0748640843

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance
on the Early Modern Stage
Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Islamic Conversion and
Christian Resistance on the
Early Modern Stage
Jane Hwang Degenhardt
Edinburgh University Press

For James and Minjoo
© Jane Hwang Degenhardt, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Sabon and Futura

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4084 3 (hardback)
The right of Jane Hwang Degenhardt

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures vi
Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption:

“Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith 1
1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily

Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello 32
2 Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied
Resistance to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr and
Other Red Bull Plays 73
3 Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual
Redemption in The Renegado 121
4 “Reforming” the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and
Temperance in Five Early Modern Plays 152
5 Epilogue: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy
(Or Not): Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso 208
Notes 223
Index 259
Acknowledgments
This book has been fostered by many wonderful teachers and mentors
who have shaped my thinking over the years. While they are not respon-
sible for any of the book’s shortcomings, they certainly deserve thanks for
any strengths it may have. Most of all, I am grateful to Jean Howard for
offering a model of excellence. I deeply value her honest appraisals and
her shared appreciation for the imaginative potential of the theater. For
their inspired and rigorous training, I thank Margreta de Grazia and
Peter Stallybrass. Together, they made the study of Renaissance litera-
ture irresistible. I thank as well my other mentors from the University of
Pennsylvania, especially Ania Loomba, Phyllis Rackin, Barbara Fuchs,
and David Wallace. Earlier in my academic career I benefited from a
wealth of teachers who influenced me in ways they may never know. I
would not be doing what I am today if it were not for Agha Shahid Ali,
John O’Neill, Austin Briggs, Vincent Odamtten, Ama Ata Aidoo, James
Thompson, Mae Henderson, Catherine Belsey, and Houston Baker.
If I have been fortunate in my teachers, I am just as fortunate in
my many colleagues and students at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, who have supported me in the completion of this book. Arthur
Kinney has made Renaissance Studies a rich communal experience in
western Massachusetts. In addition to a department full of support-
ive colleagues, I have benefited from two wonderful chairs who have
looked out for my interests: Anne Herrington and Joseph Bartolomeo.
The Five-College Renaissance Seminar, the Interdisciplinary Seminar
in the Humanities and the Fine Arts, and the English Department
Colloquia offered occasions at UMass to share my book-in-progress. I
am particularly grateful to my research assistants, Phil Palmer and Tim
Zajac, as well as to Sandra Williamson, without whom this book would
have taken much longer to complete. I also want to thank my colleagues
in the four colleges who have gone out of their ways to make me feel
welcome and supported – lending their offices, their sympathetic ears,
Acknowledgments v
and their critical eyes: Brown Kennedy, Peter Berek, Sharon Seelig, Ann
Jones, Lise Sanders, Marisa Parham, John Drabinski, Anston Bosman,
and Barry O’Connell.
As my closest friends know, writing this book has involved a compli-
cated juggling act, and I can say without a doubt that my act would not
have been possible without the help of these friends. For being there for
me in so many ways, I thank Suzanne Daly, as well as Julia Lee, Deb
Aaronson, Asha Nadkarni, Haivan Hoang, and Jen Adams. Before start-
ing my job I was incredibly lucky to be part of a supportive community
of graduate students who continue to foster my intellectual life. I am
especially grateful to Elizabeth Williamson for her constant faith. She
is brilliant in every way. I also thank Jean Feerick, Marissa Greenberg,
Cyrus Mulready, and Clare Costley King’oo for their wealth of expertise
that is so freely shared. This book has also benefited in direct ways from
scholars who have gone out of their way to share their work with me
or offer feedback: Amanda Bailey, Jonathan Burton, Valerie Forman,
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Susannah Brietz Monta, Michael Neill, Holly
Crawford Pickett, Debora Shuger, and Sarah Wall-Randell.
I am extremely grateful to Wendy Lochner for her immediate
encouragement and for shepherding my manuscript through the review
process at Columbia. And my heartfelt thanks go to Jackie Jones at
Edinburgh University Press for so unhesitatingly taking the book on
when Columbia decided to refocus their publishing program. I am
fortunate to have worked with two such humane and professional
editors.
Finally, I thank those in my family whose love and good humor have
been constants throughout this long process. My mother and brother
are among my closest friends and have always supported my intellec-
tual pursuits. My husband Jim has provided both spiritual and material
support, as well as essential doses of irony. I thank him for honoring
my love for my work. My children, James and Minjoo, help to put
everything into perspective. I am grateful to them for the time they
sacrificed for me to complete this work as well as for the time that they
refused to sacrifice. It is to them that I dedicate this book and everything
good that I do.
Versions of Chapters Two and Three have appeared in ELH and The
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. I am grateful to the editors
of these publications for permission to reprint these materials here. I
also thank UMass for supplying a pre-tenure research leave, as well
as a Faculty Research/Healy Endowment Grant and a Mellon Mutual
Mentoring Micro-Grant. Earlier versions of the book were presented at
the University of Connecticut and Harvard University.
Figures
Figure 0.1: “Prophetic Visions,” from Ludovico Cortano,

Good newes to Christendome (London, 1620), title page
woodcut. Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library. 19
Figure 2.1: “The Description of the Contreis and Places
Mencioned in the Actes of the Apostles,” from The Bible
and Holy Scriptures . . . [Geneva Bible] (London, 1560).
Reproduced by permission of the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries. 77
Figure 2.2: “The burning of Rawlins White, Martyr,” from
John Foxe, Acts and monuments (London, 1610).
Reproduced by permission of the Massachusetts Center
for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. 88
Figure 2.3: Torture of St. Lucy, from Jacobus de Voragine,
Legenda aurea (France, s. XIIIex), MS HM 3027, f. 4v.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 89
Figure 2.4: Torture of St. Euphemia, from Jacobus de
Voragine, Legenda aurea (France, s. XIIIex), MS HM
3027, f. 128r. Reproduced by permission of the
Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 90
Figure 2.5: Christian Martyrs, from Antonio Gallonio,
Trattato de gli instrumenti di martyrio (Rome, 1591), sig.
H2r. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Charles Lea
Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries. 91
Figure 2.6: Christian Martyrs, from Antonio Gallonio,
Trattato de gli instrumenti di martyrio (Rome, 1591),
119. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Charles
Lea Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries. 92
List of Figures vii
Figure 2.7: A scene of Turkish torture, Christopher Angell, A
Grecian, who tasted of many stripes inflicted by the
Turkes (Oxford, 1617), sig. A4r. Reproduced by
permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 96
Figure 2.8: “The manner of Turkish tyrannie over Christian
slaves,” from Francis Knight, A relation of seaven
yeares slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire, suffered
by an English captive merchant (London: 1640),
frontispiece. Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Figure 2.9: Frontispiece, from William Okeley, Eben-ezer; or,
A small monument of great mercy, appearing in the
miraculous deliverance of William Okeley (London,
1684). Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Figure 3.1: Jesuit priests, from Thomas Scott, The second part
of Vox populi (London, 1624), G4v. Reproduced by
permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 130
Figure 3.2: Jean de Chassanion, Merchandises of popish
priests (London: 1629), title page woodcut. Reproduced
by permission of the Faculty of Advocates and the
Abbotsford Library Project. 135
Figure 3.3: Detail of the virginal hymen, from Thomas
Bartholin, Bartholinus anatomy (London, 1668), 76,
plate V. Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Figure 3.4: Catholic objects weighed against the Protestant
Word, from Thomas Williamson, The sword of the
spirit to smite in pieces that antichristian Goliah
(London, 1613), sig. B3r. Reproduced by permission
of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 137
Figure 3.5: A Eucharistic mass, from Thomas Williamson,
The sword of the spirit to smite in pieces that
antichristian Goliah (London, 1613), sig. C1r.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California. 145
Figure 4.1: A Knight of Malta, from William Segar, Honor
military and ciuill (London, 1602). Reproduced by
permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. 156
viii Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance
Figure 4.2: Domenico Zenoi, “Assedio de L’Isola di Malta” or
“The Siege of Malta,” (1565). Reproduced by permission
of the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. 159
Figure 4.3: Caravaggio, Knight of the Order of Malta (c.1608).
Oil on canvas. 465/8 × 375/8 in. (118.5 × 95.5 cm). Galleria
Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy. Photo Credit:
Scala / Art Resource, NY. 180
Figure 4.4: Anthony van Dyck, Sir Robert Shirley (c.1622).
Petworth House, The Egremont Collection (acquired in
lieu of tax by H.M.Treasury in 1957 and subsequently
transferred to The National Trust). ©NTPL/Derrick
E. Witty. 204
Figure 5.1: Book 19 from Ludovico Ariosto (trans. John
Harington), Orlando Furioso (London, 1591), Plate
XVIIII. Reproduced by permission of the Massachusetts
Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. 219
Introduction
Seduction, Resistance, and

Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the
Embodiment of Christian Faith
Nay, if the flesh take hold of him, he’s past redemption.

He’s half a Turk already; it’s as good as done.
Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610)1
Could anything be worse than being captured by Turks, stripped,

beaten, and mercilessly killed? In the minds of early modern English
people, there was one thing even worse than dying at the hands of
Turks: conversion. Whereas a death by martyrdom offered the chance
for salvation, converting to Islam set one on a path of irredeemable
damnation. In addition, “turning Turk” implied not just a religious
conversion, but also the complete undoing of all things constitutive of
an English Christian identity.
It was a threat that was oddly familiar to those living in and
around London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies. The Ottoman empire may have been halfway across the
globe, but its influence was increasingly present in the daily lives of
English Christians – in the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the
sermons they heard at church, the stories they read in the news, and
the fears and fantasies that filled their imaginations. In particular,
English awareness of the Ottoman empire heightened as the result of
England’s growing participation in Mediterranean trade. Commerce
brought eastern imports into English spaces and drew increasing
numbers of English citizens to the waters and ports of the eastern
Mediterranean. But commerce depended upon certain risks, which
included not only the dangers of seafaring and the economic risks
of piracy and foreign investment, but also the personal risk of losing
English bodies and souls to Islamic conversion. The more general
threat of Ottoman imperialism – of course linked to commerce
in various ways – also raised the specter of conversion. Stories of
Muslim conquest and forced conversion in places such as Greece,
2 Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance
Hungary, and the Balkans were well known to the English, and
by the early seventeenth century Turkish ships had ventured as far
west as the English Channel. Indeed, there were numerous real-life
Christian, even English, converts to Islam during this period, many of
whom had been captured by Turks in the pursuit of trade.2 But just
as powerful was the imagined threat of conversion that emerged in
English stage plays and in other popular media. Within this context,
the collective (and interrelated) commercial, imperial, religious, and
cultural threats of the Ottoman empire were condensed into a single,
personalized threat that centered upon the individual Christian body
and soul. This book interrogates the ways that Christian-Muslim
conversion was conceived in the popular imagination, focusing in
particular on the theater both as a receptacle for popular beliefs and
as an influential force in shaping them. In the following chapters, I
seek to uncover the particular terms by which conversion to Islam,
as well as Christian resistance and redemption, were imagined to
take place, and what these embodied terms might tell us about the
threshold of difference that divided Christians from Muslims.
If conversion to Islam transformed one’s earthly identity and
damned the soul, it did so by targeting the Christian body. Naturally,
the stage would make conversion a matter of bodies and outward
materiality, but there were important ways in which the physical tech-
nologies of the theater accorded with beliefs about the nature of Islam’s
particular threat of conversion. Numerous news pamphlets and travel
books from the period offer graphic accounts of the physical tortures
used to coerce Islamic conversion and the permanent bodily mark that
conversion left in the form of circumcision. In The famous and wonder-
full recoverie of a ship of Bristoll, a news pamphlet published in 1622,
John Rawlins describes his experience as a Turkish captive by empha-
sizing its physical ramifications. As he explains, “the first newes [he]
encountered” upon his arrival as a newly captured man in Ottoman
Algiers concerned the excruciating methods of torture used to force
Christian slaves to turn Turk:
They commonly lay them on their naked backs, or bellies, beating them so
long, till they bleed at the nose and mouth, and if yet they continue constant,
then they strike the teeth out of their heads, pinch them by their tongues,
and use many other sorts of tortures to convert them; nay, many times they
lay them on their whole length in the ground like a grave, and so cover them
with boords threatening to starve them, if they will not turn, and so many
even for feare of torment, and death, make their tongues betray their hearts
to a most fearful wickednesse, and so are circumcised with new names, and
brought to confesse a new religion. [. . .] and this was the first newes we
encountered with at our coming first to Algiers.3
Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption 3
In addition to indulging the physical details of bodily torture, this
description invokes conversion as a literal turn of the body, conjured
through its visualization of Christian bodies being laid “on their naked
backs, or bellies” or “in the ground like a grave” and then threatened
“if they will not turn” as if on a skewer. In addition, Rawlins attests,
conversion is coerced through the body despite or against the inner
intentions of the victim’s heart, in that “feare of torment, and death”
makes the captives’ “tongues betray their hearts.” The immediate
consequences of voicing an acceptance of Islam are also manifestly
physical: the converted Christian is circumcised and receives a new
name. Thus, after being laid in the ground “like a grave” and buried
with boards, the convert is in effect reborn to a fate construed to be
worse than death. As Rawlins suggests, conversion to Islam threatens a
complete and permanent undoing of Christian identity. Manifested in
external terms such as a change of name and an indelible mark upon
one’s body, this transformation may or may not mirror the intentions
of one’s heart or soul.
In fact, depending upon one’s assumptions about the spiritual
dimensions of religious conversion, it may seem striking that the word
“soul” is completely absent from Rawlins’s description. Certainly, the
soul is affected by conversion, but according to the logic that Rawlins
presents, the soul’s transformation is driven by the physical pain (or
fear) of torture, the physical betrayal of the tongue, and the physical
mark of circumcision, rather than the convictions of the soul driving the
body. At the very least, Rawlins’s description of conversion reveals the
intertwined nature of confessional identity and physical embodiment.
The body’s sway over the soul may seem to apply most clearly to
involuntary converts. Of course, not all converts were won against
their wills, and Rawlins acknowledges another category of apostates
who willingly shed their Christian identities and embraced Islam. But
even these converts are driven by an impulse that seems to originate in
the body:
Others again, I must confess, who never knew any God, but their owne
sensuall lusts, and pleasures, thought that any religion would serve their
turnes, and so for preferment or wealth very voluntarily renounced their
faith, and became Renegadoes, in despite of any counsel which seemed to
intercept them.4
Drawing upon an already longstanding tradition of associating Islam
with “sensuall lusts, and pleasures,” Rawlins describes the temptation
to convert as a sexual one.5 Again, the embracement of Islam as a reli-
gious choice comes secondary to that which it affords: easier access to
sexual pleasures and monetary wealth. Doctrinal persuasion appears to
be as irrelevant to these individuals as Christian attempts to “intercept”
them from renouncing Christianity. Indeed, in the case of these ren-
egades, “any religion would serve their turnes,” and thus conversion to
Islam is not really construed to be a “religious” choice. What is more,
the sexual connotation of “serving a turn,” invoking both the “turn”
of conversion and “screwing,” as well as referring to the fulfillment
of one’s sexual desires, underscores the carnal motivations for Islamic
conversion.6 According to Rawlins, Islam also attracts those who are
susceptible to the superficial rewards of “pleasures,” “preferment,” and
“wealth,” which again are implicitly defined against the less immediate
and tangible rewards of a Christian soul.
Conversion and Theatricality
The stage was the perfect medium for capitalizing on the visceral
appeal of forced conversions and physical resistance. Because of its
visual and aural orientations, theater could bring these things to life
like no other medium. Dramatic counterparts to the tortures described
by Rawlins included Thomas Shirley’s torture on the rack in The
Travails of the Three English Brothers (c.1607), Ariana’s condemna-
tion to the scaffold in The Knight of Malta (c.1618), and Vitelli’s
imprisonment in biting chains in The Renegado (c.1624), as well as
plays that established a resonance between early Christian martyrs
and the persecution of Christian captives by Turks. Stories adapted
from the news as well as from medieval romance, involving travel
to faraway places, dangerous exploits in foreign settings, shipwreck,
captivity and rescue, torture, and of course conversion and resist-
ance, provided wonderful opportunities for grand spectacles and
exotic costuming and props. As I will go on to discuss, depictions of
cross-cultural encounters in the Mediterranean and of Turks and the
Ottoman empire were particularly topical because of England’s com-
mercial interests at the time. Jonathan Burton estimates there were
“over sixty dramatic works featuring Islamic themes, characters, or
settings,” and certainly many more plays registered England’s perva-
sive awareness of the Turks through brief or allusive references.7 Given
this fascination with Islam, it is not difficult to understand the dra-
matic appeal of stories of threatened conversion, or why they lent
themselves so well to theatrical performance.
At its most basic level, the stage itself functioned as a technol-
ogy of illicit conversion: it converted male actors into gentlemen and
women, Christians into Turks, Moors, and Jews, and audiences into
believers. Thus when Hamlet asks his friend Horatio whether his suc-
cessful production of “The Mousetrap” might earn him “a fellowship
in a cry of players” should “the rest of [his] fortunes turn Turk,” he
invokes an analogy between the mechanism of theatrical production
and the complete unmaking of identity that was associated with turning
Turk (3.2.269–72).8 By linking the conditions of becoming an actor,
joining a “fellowship,” and “turning Turk,” Hamlet also alludes to the
ways in which actors like Ben Jonson were marked with the brand of
indebtedness and disreputability, sometimes associated with physical
cuts or brands to the nose and ear. The dramatic nature of conver-
sion, in which a subject is seduced, forced, or driven by desperation
to abandon the most fundamental aspects of his or her identity, and
“turn” into that which is most feared, loathed, or perceived to be
essentially different, not only provided immense theatrical appeal but
was itself essentially theatrical. Depending on how they were enacted,
staged conversions between Christianity and Islam could be harrowing,
humorous, shocking, appalling, or miraculous.
In beginning a book about the imaginative contours of Islamic con-
version with an example from a news pamphlet, I want to stress the
close relationship between the stage and the popular news press in early
modern England. Targeting what was often the same popular audience,
plays and news pamphlets tapped into topical interests and borrowed
material from one another. And just as the stage shaped and embel-
lished content from real life, pamphlets like that of Rawlins shaped the
meaning of conversion through their particular stylistic and narrative
choices, including the use of diction, tone, structure, and metaphor. By
analyzing these textual details, we move beyond the basic facts of a
narrative to its more nuanced local texture and the unspoken implica-
tions of metaphor, gaining a closer sense of the more intangible ways
in which English culture understood the threat of turning Turk. As
Rawlins’s accounts illustrate above, Islamic conversion is compelled
and manifested through the body. The events Rawlins reports upon
may well be based on “truth,” but it is a mistake to impose too strict
a binary opposition between printed publications like news pamphlets
or travel narratives, presumed to be factual, reliable, and authoritative,
and more “fictional” texts like popular plays. By the same token, the
dramatic stage featured numerous characters and incidents that were
based on real-life events, though these “factual” reports were clearly fil-
tered through the imagination. Together, news pamphlets and the public
theater participated in a bilateral conversation mediated by popular
tastes and interests. Although my study focuses primarily on stage plays,
I necessarily set the public theater in the context of a larger popular
culture of exchange, facilitated by travel, commerce, the printing press,
and performance.
Whereas a number of literary critics have addressed the multifari-
ous signification of the “Turk” on the Renaissance stage, I focus on
how conversion reveals on a more immediate and personal level the
complex stakes of difference and sameness that pertain to Muslim and
Christian identities. In analyzing the mechanism that threatened to turn
Christians into Muslims, I observe how it enlisted various logics of
sexuality and gender, manipulating them within and against the con-
ventions of dramatic genre. In particular, I interrogate the tragic stakes
of conversion and its comic aversions by looking at how conversion
to Islam was often represented as a sexual threat, and what it meant
that its aversion was rooted in physical chastity and temperance. What
did these imaginative stakes reveal about how English culture was
grappling with differences between Christians and Muslims? In other
words, if conversion to Islam represented a fate worse than death, what
did it mean that its tragic stakes were directly associated with inter-
faith sexual intercourse? Why was a religious, or spiritual, conversion
represented on the stage in not just physical, but sexual terms? These
imaginative negotiations, I argue, offer a window on the elusive and
uneven process by which confessional identities fused into categories
that we now associate with racial differences. In establishing particular
terms for conversion (as well as for its resistance and redemption), the
stage attempted to instate an apprehensible, if permeable, threshold of
difference between Christians and Muslims. This book seeks to uncover
the particular logics of gender, sexuality, and genre that informed this
imagined threshold.
Religious Turnings
In addition, my study addresses how these negotiations were performed

in terms specific to the history of Protestant reform, revealing how the
threat of conversion was importantly framed by a culture of domestic
religious unrest. Conversion was already a vexed issue in England given
the culture of conversion created by the Reformation and its instabili-
ties. Moreover, the foreign threat of Islam exacerbated existing cultural
controversies over the material or immaterial basis of Christian faith
and its proper forms of expression. In the decades following England’s
break from Catholicism, Protestant reformers not only rejected mate-
rial objects such as icons, relics, rosary beads, and crucifixes, but
also eschewed certain embodied expressions of Christian faith. These
included practices such as vowed virginity, fasting, and self-flagellation;
outward signs of devotion such as genuflection and making the sign
of the cross; the veneration of saints’ body parts; the idea that priests
could serve as human proxies for God; and even the emphasis on
Jesus’s corporeality and the notion of consuming his flesh that were
implicit in Catholic understandings of transubstantiation. In place of
these embodied practices, Protestant reformers attempted to empha-
size a more spiritualized and intangible notion of Christian faith that
was not driven by bodily or material expression. But because Islamic
conversion was understood in the popular imagination to be a physical
threat, it drew attention to the untenable nature of such an ideal and
pointed up the need for more tangible methods of Christian resistance
and redemption, including materials and practices recently devalued
by the Reformation. In response to the terrifying specter of Islamic
conversion, the stage turned to the embodied and ceremonial forms of
England’s Catholic past, reinvesting the talismanic qualities of relics
and crosses, the mediating powers of the priest, and the redemptive
magic of the sacraments.
Thus, the early modern stage shows us how English ambivalence
about Protestant disembodiment and immateriality was brought to a
particular crisis by Islam. When pitted against the specter of Islamic con-
version, the spiritualized expressions of faith championed by Protestant
reformers could not offer convincing enough methods of Christian
defense, and required supplementation by embodied and material
forms of resistance. Certainly, the endurance of embodied and mate-
rial religious practices haunted Protestantism even outside the threat of
Islam. A culture forcibly converted from Catholicism to Protestantism
did not easily relinquish the devotional habits to which it had been
long accustomed, and English Protestantism retained many elements
of Catholic practice.9 As Elizabeth Williamson has persuasively shown,
the theater’s frequent use of stage props that included (or looked like)
Catholic objects exploited the layers of meaning and complex emo-
tional responses that were attached to these objects in the wake of the
Reformation.10 That these objects could be both derided and venerated
within the fictions of early modern plays reflects the “ongoing contra-
dictions between post-Reformation theory and practice.”11 In this book
I demonstrate how Islam, and in particular the embodied consequences
associated with conversion to Islam, helped to fuel these ongoing
contradictions. I interpret the stage’s use of Catholic forms to combat
Islam not as evidence of Catholic sympathies per se, but as one way in
which the threat of conversion forced differences of faith into the physi-
cal realm. In producing a new model of Christian faith that physically
resisted conversion, the stage established a boundary between Christian
and Muslim identity that was not merely religious and spiritual in
nature, but also embodied, sexual, and increasingly racialized. Not
only did Islam compel Protestants to re-embrace some of their dis-
carded ideas about the materiality of faith, then; it also drove them to
perceive religious differences in racial terms. In short, this book maps a
certain conjunction between an early modern history of race and that of
post-Reformation controversy over the nature of Christian faith.
To the extent that my study addresses the relationship between
theater and religious culture, it engages a current critical dialogue
surrounding the recent “turn to religion” in early modern English
studies. In an important 2004 article Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti
chart this critical turn and also identify a splintering of scholarly
approaches.12 In particular, they critique a tendency among some
New Historicist critics to translate the “alterity” of early modern reli-
gion too quickly into other struggles of social, economic, or political
power.13 My approach seeks to avoid this tendency by emphasizing
how, in its attempts to apprehend conversion to Islam, the stage inti-
mately engaged with early modern religious culture and exposed – and
even promulgated – ruptures in the conceptual application of Protestant
models of faith. These ruptures reveal not simply that religion should
be read as race, but rather an imaginative process whereby religious
identities became fused with national, embodied, and proto-racial
categories. Thus, I call attention to how the stage’s exploration of
conversion directly engaged a religious concern while also revealing
the limitations of existing religious categories and concepts. While I
view the theater as an imaginative and ultimately secular institution, I
am distinctly interested in how the stage drew upon religious language
and structures, responded to religious controversies, and even recreated
religious experiences through its multiple sensory effects. I would not
want to overestimate the theater’s investment in religious doctrine, but
by the same token I do not believe that the stage necessarily evacuated
doctrinal allusions of their religious significance. As Michael O’Connell
puts it, while not inherently religious in nature, the public stage was an
important “site of religious contestation” insofar as it was the place
“where the deepest preoccupations of the culture found expression and
representation.”14 My book demonstrates how the stage’s engagement
of Islam was directly informed by a backdrop of domestic religious
controversy, as well as how the threat of conversion imaginatively
impinged upon domestic religious controversies. But, as Anthony
Dawson observes, religion was just one of the languages that the theater
engaged, and in its redeployment of this language the theater often
“shifted and transformed” religion through the very fact of perform-
ance and its commercial context.15 As I hope my analysis bears out, it
is important to acknowledge how the theater not only demystified but
also remystified religious content through its imaginative renegotiations
and because of its particular goals of entertainment and profit. Religion
on the stage was not necessarily a screen for other power struggles, but
neither was the theater a transparent screen for religion.
Commercial and Imperial Backdrop
Recent historians, seeking to redress the long-overlooked influence

of eastern trade on early modern English culture, have well estab-
lished the historical backdrop of increased English awareness of the
Ottoman empire.16 During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, England underwent a marked shift in its commercial orienta-
tion.17 Increasingly less reliant on their cloth export trade with northern
Europe, the English began in the late sixteenth century to pursue com-
mercial opportunities in the Near and Far East opened up to them by the
collapse of the Antwerp and Iberian entrepôts and the weakening holds
of Portugal and Spain within the eastern territories. With the chartering
of the joint stock companies, including the Levant Company in 1592
and the East India Company in 1599, the English forged monopolies
on eastern Mediterranean trade.18 They began to import large quanti-
ties of raw silks and spices for domestic manufacturing, broad home
consumption, and re-export within Europe. Yet, as many critics have
acknowledged, the English were far from an imperial power in this
period, and their early commercial intercourse in the Mediterranean
was colored by their profound awareness of the far larger, wealthier,
and more powerful Ottoman empire. For English seamen venturing
into the foreign and largely unpoliced territories of the southeastern
Mediterranean, the dangers were many. Because maps and naviga-
tional technology were unreliable, English seamen frequently got lost or
shipwrecked, and starvation and sickness were common. Perhaps most
menacingly, English ships were constantly threatened by attacks from
other merchant ships, including Barbary pirates and Turks, as well as
Spanish and other Christian competitors in the region.
In addition to confronting the perils of maritime commerce, the
English were repeatedly reminded of the Ottoman empire’s impe-
rial ambitions and its increasing incursions on European territories.
Ottoman territorial threats continued a long history of Christian-
Muslim warfare, including the Crusades as well as more recent
sixteenth-century struggles over the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes,
Malta, Crete, Sicily, and Cyprus. As texts such as The Estates,
Empires, and Principallities of the World (1615) ominously reported,
the Ottoman empire’s imperial dominion now extended 3,000 miles
“from Buda to Constantinople,” as well as across the northern coast
of Africa from Alexandria to the border of Morocco.19 In taking up
the rhetoric of the Crusades many early modern writers interpreted
Ottoman imperialism as a religious threat to all Christendom, lament-
ing the loss of a united Christendom due to the fracturing effects of
the Reformation. Together, the threats of Turkish imperial expansion,
piracy, and, by extension, conversion set the scene for a proliferation
of Muslim characters on the English stage as well as the production of
numerous plays featuring intercultural conflicts between Christians and
Turks in Mediterranean settings.
Given the imperial dominance of the Ottoman empire in the early
modern period, the majority of existing studies on representations of
Islam in English literature and culture share an interest in undoing
assumptions about western supremacy that characterize later periods.
Edward Said’s Orientalism offers a theoretical model around which
these recent studies converge and from which they depart.20 Whereas
Said’s model is premised on the Christian West’s dominance over the
Islamic East, studies of the early modern period address the impli-
cations of England’s pre-imperial status. Accordingly, Richmond
Barbour’s Before Orientalism (2003) begins with an acknowledgment
of England’s belatedness in the realms of overseas exploration, trade,
and colonization, and, in taking account of “the disparities between
dominant representations and foreign negotiations,” seeks to expose
the unequal power dynamic that popular representations often occluded
or distorted.21 Similarly, Nabil Matar (1998, 1999), Daniel Vitkus
(2003), and Jonathan Burton (2005) emphasize the ways in which the
relationship between early modern England and the Ottoman empire
does not accord with the Orientalist paradigm.22 In particular, they
draw attention to a rich archive of early modern writings on Turks, and
to the diverse ways that Turks were represented on the stage. Recent
studies by Matthew Dimmock, Linda McJannet, Benedict Robinson,
and Bernadette Andrea build upon these introductions to the “Turk”
plays by focusing on more specific time periods, generic influences,
or thematic concerns; in doing so, they continue to weigh in on the
Orientalism debate, but also steer it in new directions.23 For example,
Andrea considers how hierarchies of gender complicated the power
dynamics between England and the Islamic world. And Robinson
offers a useful qualification to the critical consensus that rejects Said’s
model; recognizing that Orientalism is not just a question of empire but
also of the cultural and intellectual dispositions that helped to enable
empire, he reminds us of the dangers of overstating “the firm line
drawn between early modern and postcolonial studies.”24
I share Robinson’s view that the history of English imperialism
begins prior to its absolute realization and that there are important
ways in which imperial logic is rooted in the cultural desires and fanta-
sies that find their expression on the stage in other imagined forms. In
my reading, the negotiations of the imagination that took place in
the popular theater helped to establish a grammar of the Orient even
in the face of geopolitical realities that suggested Ottoman imperial
dominance. Thus, I address the Orientalism debate not by reading
geopolitical realities onto the early modern stage, or even by observ-
ing how the stage challenged geopolitical realities, but by looking at
how theatrical representations of conversion betray a dynamic power
struggle that played out on the level of religious identity and its desta-
bilization. Attending to the imaginative function of conversion as a site
where the terms of religious identity start to bleed into something akin
to racial identity offers a more nuanced, if admittedly more narrow,
understanding of these broader power struggles (between East and
West, England and the Ottoman empire, or Christendom and Islam).
Historicizing Race
The question of whether race is a valid category for talking about

Muslim Turks in early modern England – if it applies at all to the period
– has been vigorously debated by critics. In particular, critics have ques-
tioned whether Turks were distinguished by phenotypical differences
that could be suggestive of racial markings. Visual representations
of Turks ranged from serious portraits in chronicles such as Richard
Knolles Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) and commemorative
portrait medals to the derogatory caricatures of the “Turk’s head” on
tavern signs and archery targets. Philip Henslowe’s inventory of the
costumes and stage properties owned by the Admiral’s Men in March
of 1598 included an unspecified number of “Turckes hedes” as well
as an “owld Mahemetes head,” suggestive of identifiable facial fea-
tures.25 In addition, Muslims shared with Jews the physical stigma of
circumcision, which, as critics such as James Shapiro, Julia Reinhard
Lupton, and Janet Adelman have argued, may have signified in ways
more threatening than taxonomies of color.26 We might be tempted
to conclude that the mark of circumcision approximated modern
formulations of race more accurately than early modern understandings
of skin color, though as I discuss in Chapter 1 it is important to bear in
mind the difference between physical and physiological traits, as well as
between inherited ones and environmentally produced ones. Drawing
primarily on English Ottoman histories, Linda McJannet has concluded
that “The ‘swarthy Turk’ is an entirely modern construction.”27 At the
same time, references from dramatic dialogue reveal that at least some
Muslim “Turks” were depicted on the stage with dark complexions
and subsequently demonized or ridiculed on this basis.28 Thus, it is
important to consider how phenotypical differences may have figured
differently in different genres and cultural media. Moreover, it is neces-
sary to realize that skin color was not always understood in terms of an
inherited phenotypical difference: it was also linked to environmental
effects on the body’s humors, to the biblical curse of Ham, and to the
work of the devil. Thus blackness was not necessarily a condition of
race in the same way that it is today. Disagreements over whether cir-
cumcision and skin color amounted to distinctions of race, and which
if either was the more pertinent sign, seem to reflect an irresolvable lack
of consensus over how to define racial criteria in the period. And of
course, phenotypical difference, or physical difference rooted in genetic
and environmental factors, is not the only way to identify the presence
of race. As Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba assert in their recent
documentary companion on early modern race, racial logic necessarily
encompasses not only distinctive combinations of physical traits, “but
also the eclectic range of cultural differences that are used to explain,
manage, or reorganize relations of power.”29
One of the difficulties of talking about race in early modern England
is the lack of a contemporary term for it. It does not help matters that
the term “race” was in fact abundantly used in early modern discourses,
but with a meaning quite distinct from our own.30 As Jean Feerick
has pointed out, whereas modern definitions emphasize distinctions
like skin color, the structural logic of early modern “race” was more
proximate to social “rank.”31 The distinction between early modern
(or pre-modern) and modern usages of the term has led critics to either
deny the presence of anything akin to modern race in the early modern
period or too easily conflate the earlier and later meanings. Feerick
rightly points out that such critical responses have “discouraged careful
consideration of the ways a singular semantic unit – race – can describe
quite distinct social formations across the historical divides that anchor
its meaning.”32 She offers a necessary corrective to these dehistoricizing
tendencies by bringing into view a blood-based social hierarchy that
somatically anchored early modern differences of race/rank, showing
how modern racial formations were predicated upon the decline of
this earlier blood system. Feerick’s insistence that the significance of
“blood” as an inheritable condition of rank and a precursor to modern
race should not simply be translated as “class” underscores her interest
in exposing the interrelationship between the two racial systems – the
earlier one unraveling as the later one emerged.
Clearly, to speak of racial difference in the early modern period is
not to reference the same kinds of distinctions and historical conditions
that characterize modern understandings of race. At the same time,
the absence of a term to describe even a fuzzy category of difference
linking “natural” distinctions with cultural hierarchies does not mean
that the category itself did not exist in some form. When I use the term
“race” in this study I am referring neither to the same term as it func-
tioned in the early modern period nor to an unnamed concept of race
that is exactly equivalent to our own. Rather, I refer to an unstable
and newly emerging category whose dynamic presence could only be
apprehended through the increasing insufficiency of existing terms or
concepts, such as “religious identity,” to contain it. Whereas Feerick
uncovers a crucial discursive phase in the genealogical history of race
by calling attention to a system of blood, I offer a different window
on this process. Attending to the embodied and sexual logic of conver-
sion and its somatic anchoring of Protestant faith, I capture a point
of transition between constructions of religious and racial identity. If
race may be seen to spill over from categories of religious identity, I
argue that the categorical excess of race came into view inadvertently
on the public stage through representations of Islamic conversion.
Taking a cue from Ania Loomba, I locate cultural hierarchies not in
their absolute and full-fledged realization, but in the subtle negotia-
tions of imagined forms. Moreover, I identify moments of transition
in the cultural ruptures produced by the body’s anxious and insistent
intrusions on the spiritual process of conversion – betraying a racial
logic that exposes itself not directly but in spite of itself. In plain terms,
conversion reveals an imaginative rupture where race breaks away from
religious identity.
Critics such as Kim Hall, Joyce Green MacDonald, Mary Floyd-
Wilson, and Lara Bovilsky have similarly used the stage to explore
the cultural history of race by analyzing how the stage reappropriated
tropes of darkness and fairness, refigured classical humoral traditions,
and revealed parallels between race and gender.33 Other critics such
as Dympna Callaghan, Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Andrea Stevens
have focused more explicitly on the evolving material technologies of
face paint to draw conclusions about constructions of racial difference
in specific plays.34 While there are limits to what we can know about
the staging of Islamic figures in the early modern theater, we can discern
something about the use of turbans and other costuming, as well as
technologies of face paint, through surviving inventories of stage props
and cues from dialogue and stage directions in the playtexts. Although
my own approach complements the work of these scholars, I focus not
on racial materiality itself, but on what we can learn about the nature
of racial embodiment through the process of conversion. Approaching
race from this angle forces us to understand race itself as a dynamic and
unstable process. Accordingly, I uncover the hidden stakes of Islamic
conversion and Christian redemption. In other words, what did it take
to render a conversion complete, and by what means could conversion
be reversed? How did factors such as gender, setting, and genre play
into these equations?
Seduction and the Stage
As the plays I discuss in this book reveal, sexual seduction functions as

a crucial vehicle for linking conversion to a racial logic. Rawlins’s har-
rowing description of the fate of Christian captives in Algiers alludes
to the sexual motivations of renegades, but the sexualized element of
conversion was even more overt on the public stage, where turning
Turk was often presented as the inevitable consequence of interfaith
seduction or rape. Part of the way the stage racialized Muslims was
by casting them as sexual predators, the Muslim woman an exotic
temptress in need of taming, and the Muslim man a lust-controlled
rapist, contained best through annihilation. What is more, in closely
associating conversion with sexual intercourse between a Christian
and a Muslim, the stage represented conversion’s effects in terms that
involved the reproductive physical body. The stage’s heightened anxiety
around the sexual penetration of a Christian woman by a Muslim man
suggested that conversion followed a patriarchal logic which rendered
the female body and its offspring more vulnerable than Christian men
to reinscription by a Muslim sexual partner.
Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610) offers a vivid
illustration of the stage’s representation of Christian-Muslim conver-
sion as a consequence of sexual seduction. As a number of critics have
by now brought to our attention, the play fictionalizes the exploits of
John Ward, a real-life English pirate based in Tunis, who converted to
Islam and lived the remainder of his life as an Ottoman subject. Two
contemporary news pamphlets that describe the piratical activities of
John Ward (along with another notorious Christian renegade named
Simon Dansiker) suggest that the play’s performance joined other
ventures aimed at capitalizing on Ward’s popularity.35 Crucial differ-
ences between the play and the pamphlets’ representations of Ward,
however, reveal the stage’s unique commitment to telling Ward’s story
as a story of conversion. And more specifically, the play illustrates
the stage’s unique tendency to link Christian-Muslim conversion to
interfaith sexual attraction and intercourse. Whereas other critics
have drawn attention to the play’s fabrications of Ward’s biography
to reveal Daborne’s moral commitment to denouncing Ward’s piracy
and holding him up as a cautionary lesson, I hope to reveal the more
particular ways in which the play establishes the implications of con-
version as well as the hidden logics of sexuality, gender, and genre that
underpin it.36
It is perhaps worth underscoring the great pains to which this play
goes to link Ward’s conversion exclusively to sexual desire and inter-
course. Prior to his conversion, Ward explicitly and repeatedly rejects a
wide variety of pressures to persuade him to convert, including prom-
ises of material wealth, status, and protection, as well as arguments of
logic that flatter his intelligence, proclaim the righteousness of Islam,
or emphasize Islam’s supposed freedoms and tolerance of carnal pleas-
ures. Having repeatedly failed with such strategies to entice Ward, the
captain of the Janissaries whispers to his associate, “Work in my sister
presently” (7.80). Only when confronted with this beautiful Turkish
temptress does Ward’s former resolve fall to pieces. At first sight of her,
he is deeply moved, and confesses, “I am no more mine own . . . Here
is an orator can turn me easily. / Where beauty pleads, there needs no
sophistry. / Thou hast o’ercome me” (7.159, 164–6). Thus, the play
insists that Ward’s sole motivation for conversion is his uncontrol-
lable sexual desire for a Muslim woman – a desire that completely
“overcome[s]” him and transforms him from his former self. Burton
also draws attention to the overdetermined way in which this play
insists upon female seduction as the impetus for Ward’s conversion. But
whereas Burton reads this as a collapsing of domestic anxieties about
“unruly English women and overruled English men” onto a foreign
context, I am interested in the collapsing of conversion itself onto an
act of sexual intercourse.37
In addition to establishing a causal relationship between sexual
intercourse and conversion, the play understands Islamic conversion to
be a permanent, one-way process: whereas the Christian can become
Muslim through the transgression of his sexual body, he cannot return
to the Christian fold. I argue that it is by virtue of the sexual act that
is seen to facilitate Ward’s conversion that the play cannot imagine
an alternative to a tragic ending. As Benwash, a former Jew turned
Turk, says of Ward’s seduction by Voada, “Nay, if the flesh take
hold of him, he’s past redemption. / He’s half a Turk already; it’s as
good as done” (6.442–3). Notably, Benwash’s phrasing emphasizes
the agency of Ward’s “flesh,” rather than Voada’s agency as a tempt-
ress: it is not Voada, but Ward’s own “flesh” that “take[s] hold of
him.” Thus, in a sense, Ward’s “flesh” functions as a metonym for the
Muslim that threatens to convert him, implying that the alien Turk is
always already a part of him, resident in the sinful sexual desires of his
flesh. As Benwash suggests, in giving in to the “flesh” by having sex
with a Muslim woman, Ward chooses a path that is irreversible, “past
redemption,” the inevitable precursor to a tragic ending. Accordingly,
the play reveals the extraordinary stakes of interfaith sexual inter-
course. By contrast, the news pamphlets, which do not mention a
Muslim love interest, acknowledge that the real-life Ward continues to
thrive and enjoy a pleasant life of luxury in Tunis even at the time of the
play’s performance. Whereas real life rewarded Ward for his conver-
sion to Islam, Daborne’s play construes his sexual and religious trans-
gression to be the automatic precursor to a tragic downfall punctuated
by hopeless repentance, suicide, and eternal damnation. Thus, this play
shows us how the sexualized body serves as an anchor for mediating
convertibility as well as redemption, and how conversion to Islam sets
into motion a certain inevitable collusion between sexual contamina-
tion and tragedy.
Another significant way in which Daborne’s play establishes the
terms of Islamic conversion is through its negotiation of gender. In
foregrounding a male protagonist, the play, like Rawlins’s pamphlet,
reflects the reality of most actual Christian renegades, who were male
merchants and professional seafarers. But what would happen if the
Christian protagonist seduced by a Muslim lover or threatened with
conversion were female? Did the stage imagine the terms and stakes
of female conversion to Islam in the same way? A Christian Turned
Turke gestures toward the possibility of female conversion through
its portrayal of a Christian virgin who is captured as booty by Ward’s
crew and must cross-dress in order to protect her sexual chastity from
the predatory lust of Turks and Christian renegades alike. Unable to
imagine the possibility of a female conversion that results from volun-
tary sexual congress with a Muslim, the play suggests a possible dis-
tinction between the stakes of male and female conversion. In addition,
it ensures that the Christian heroine not only avoids being raped by a
Turk, but also dies a martyr’s death with her virginity intact.
This book identifies a similar pattern of female resistance in a
number of other plays and reveals how female sexual constancy served
as an important model for Christian resistance to Islam. It also links the
greater anxiety surrounding sexual penetration and conversion of the
female body to the patriarchal logics that make women more suscepti-
ble than men to racial reinscription. If the interpenetration of religion
and race is a central concern of this book, then gender is the key vari-
able that exposes this interpenetration. Specifically, the factor of gender
– the difference between a Muslim man’s pursuit of a Christian woman
and a Muslim woman’s pursuit of a Christian man – was crucial in
mediating the sexual facilitation and effects of conversion, revealing the
stage’s literal interpretation of sexual intercourse, and by extension, its
racialized implications.
In plotting out the worst-case scenario – the protagonist’s seduction,
conversion, suicide, and eternal damnation – Daborne’s play provides
an object lesson in what course to avoid. By contrast, a host of other
plays depicted an alternative course for would-be converts in the form
of miraculous Christian resistance or reversals, or as Burton has argued,
confined conversion to the realm of comedic clowns and fools.38 The
terms by which these alternative outcomes were made possible reveal
the embodied nature of conversion, its complex gendered and racialized
logic, and the measures that were necessary to portray convincingly
its aversion or reversal. In other words, the orchestration of a comic
outcome (resistance, redemption) in place of a tragic one (conversion,
damnation) also tells a story about what means are necessary to avoid
or redeem an embodied transformation, pitting the intangible spirit up
against the polluted body.
Christian Resistance
More popular and pleasing than Ward’s tragic demise were narratives
that transformed Islam’s seductions and persecutions of the body into
opportunities for Christian triumph. Rawlins’s narrative, for example,
exhibits a tragicomic arc, increasingly common both on the stage and
in popular prose narratives of the early seventeenth century, wherein
the threats and dangers of Turkish captivity are overcome through
Christian fortitude and miraculous deliverance. Rawlins in fact refers to
his narrative as a “Comick Tragedie” and emphasizes from the start its
triumphant conclusion, in which he manages to overpower his captors
by leading a successful mutiny of Christian slaves.39 Notably, his organ-
ization of the mutiny is predicated upon his earlier ability to resist the
physical pressure to convert – an achievement that stresses bodily over
spiritual resistance – and both acts of resistance are carried out against
nearly impossible odds. As Rawlins’s narrative bears out, a sustained
posture of constancy and resistance is essential to bring about any suc-
cessful Christian outcome against Turkish persecution. He frames his
triumph as a testimony not only to God’s support, but also to his own
human agency – his abilities to withstand the tortures and temptations
to convert, and his initiative in organizing a mutiny even though he and
the other captives are grossly outnumbered. Thus, the narrative func-
tions as an example of how one can successfully resist the overpowering
forces of Turkish persecution: if one practices a strategy of bodily and
spiritual resilience, carried out with human initiative, ingenuity, and
persistence, one’s efforts will be rewarded by God.
In other narratives, Christian triumph against impossible odds
is more explicitly predicated on a logic of miracle, which was often
revealed through physical manifestations. A pamphlet optimistically
entitled Good Newes to Christendome (1620) suggests that the best
defense against the power of Islam might be a good offense, and
boldly predicts the impending conversion of the Turkish sultan and
all Muslims thereafter to Christianity.40 This prophesy is based upon
a miraculous vision that appeared over Muhammad’s tomb, followed
by the spontaneous extinguishing of 3,000 lamps around the tomb and
the eruption of a rainstorm of blood over the city of Rome. A woodcut
on the pamphlet’s title page depicts the vision in all of its sensational
aspects (see Figure 0.1). On the right, a floating woman in white
extends an open book to a retreating army of Muslim “Turks, Persians,
Arabians, and Moors,” who appear to float away on clouds on the left
side of the page; under the clouds, a “rayning of blood” falls upon the
buildings of Rome.41 The arresting possibility of a rainstorm of blood
associates the miracle with a physical violence connected to the body,
evoking Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion.42
In demonstrating the extreme and improbable lengths that were
necessary to imagine a Christian triumph over Islam, the narrative and
its accompanying woodcut expose the virtual impossibility of such an
outcome. But like Rawlins’s narrative, the pamphlet illustrates English
audiences’ investment in imagining a happy conclusion to Christian-
Muslim opposition and their attraction to the drama of surmounting
impossible odds. Perhaps most striking about the 1620 pamphlet are
its authorization and visual depiction of a Catholic miracle, illustrating
how the threat of Islam compelled a Catholic response characterized by
supernatural, material effects in order to convincingly portray Islam’s
defeat. English Protestants knew they were not meant to place credence
Figure 0.1: “Prophetic Visions,” from Ludovico Cortano, Good newes to

Christendome (London, 1620), title page woodcut. Reproduced by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.
in miraculous visions such as a rainstorm of blood, and often mocked

the tales of talismanic relics, divinely preserved virginity, and sponta-
neous conversions associated with Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden
Legend. And yet, the Christian conversion of the Turkish sultan, not to
mention all of Islam, was so improbable that it could only be imagined
through the Catholic rhetoric of miracle. According to its anonymous
English translator, the narrative originated as a letter written by a
Venetian merchant named Lodovico Cortano who traveled to Arabia
to visit Mahomet’s tomb. In his Prologue and Epilogue, the English
translator explains that the manuscript was brought to England “by
some of the last Venetian company” and expresses his initial discomfort
with the content and his reluctance to undertake the translation.43 He
changes his mind, however, in the hope that readers will find it of some
use even if they “cannot beleeue it as truth,” by virtue of its exemplary
illustration of how God punishes the “obstinate sinner” and sheds
mercy on the “penitent soule.”44 In other words, English Protestant
readers can appreciate the narrative not for its literal truth but for its
figurative message.
But if the translator’s paratextual frame suggests a Protestant way
to read the miracle by distilling its figurative message, the narrative
itself plays up the literal elements of the miracle. The repackaging of
the Italian manuscript for an English audience by publisher Nathaniel
Butter included his commission of the customized woodcut, which
made its sole appearance in this 1620 pamphlet. What this suggests
is that the miraculous elements of the narrative were both constitu-
tive of the pamphlet’s public appeal and warranted by its subject
matter. While English Protestants might express some discomfort in
identifying with a Catholic subject position, there were ways in which
such a position became acceptable – even necessary – when articulating
an oppositional position between Christianity and Islam. As I argue
throughout this book, the threat or fantasy of conversion provided a
catalytic site around which Protestant and Catholic interests were often
renegotiated and consolidated. It was through the narrativization of
conversion threats – and particularly because of the narrative compul-
sion to turn these threats into happy stories of Christian resistance and
redemption – that Protestant figurative metaphors fused into a more
Catholic language of miracles, rituals, material forms, and embodied
practices.
Of course, it is important to recognize that news pamphlets, like the
theater, were a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise; their content was
oriented around popular interests and what was saleable. What we can
conclude from Good Newes and Rawlins’s narrative, both produced
by the same publisher, who apparently identified a niche for Christian-
Turk encounters in the market, is that part of what made stories of
Christian conversion and resistance so sensational and entertaining
was their visceral appeal.45 Rawlins’s harrowing description of bodily
torture, as well as his plotting of a dangerous mutiny, drew readers’
empathy and sense of suspense. The sadistic physical nature of the tor-
tures and the threat of physical punishment that loomed over Rawlins
as he planned his mutiny added to the immediate and suspenseful
appeal of the narrative. In the case of Good Newes, the woodcut on the
title page achieves a similar visceral effect; it is shocking, sensational,
engrossing. To some extent, the Catholic aspects of the woodcut were
secondary to these effects. It was not the Catholicity of the woodcut
and miraculous vision, per se, that made the pamphlet entertaining and
attuned to popular tastes, but rather the sensational, visual, and sensual
nature of this material that constituted its appeal and happened to reso-
nate with Catholic modes. Perhaps similarly, part of what made nar-
ratives of Turkish persecution like Rawlins’s so entertaining were the
same things that made Catholic saints’ tales and virgin martyr legends
popular in medieval England – their graphic descriptions of sadistic
bodily torture and miraculous Christian resistance.46
But the entertainment value of this material did not mitigate the
real threat that the Ottoman empire constituted for the English. Thus,
in addition to entertaining audiences, the stage provided an impor-
tant means by which the English negotiated their relationship to the
overwhelming presence of the Ottoman empire. One important way
that plays diffused tension was by turning threats of conversion into
opportunities for Christian triumph. Plays such as Thomas Kyd’s
Soliman and Perseda (c.1589), John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip
Massinger’s The Knight of Malta (c.1618), and Massinger’s The
Renegado (c.1624) established a common pattern: threats of Muslim
seduction were resolved through Christian resistance and redemp-
tion. And, crucially, tales of triumph were dependent upon certain
forms of embodied resistance. Like the news pamphlets, they idealized
Christian constancy through physical resistance to torture. They also
played up the sexual nature of conversion by deploying irresistible
Muslim temptresses or raging male Turks who lusted after Christian
virgins. To combat these threats, the plays modeled strategies of sexual
resistance, including temperance for men and miraculously preserved
virginity for women. They attempted to mount an offensive stance
by extending the miracle of Christian conversion to Muslim women
through marriage to Christian men. Finally, they considered the ques-
tion of what happens when a Christian crosses the line and succumbs
to the pressures or seductions of Islam. Could he or she ever be brought
back into the Christian fold? Was redemption possible, and if so, for
whom and on what conditions?
Narrative Models
To devise plots of Christian-Muslim encounter, English playwrights

drew upon, recycled, and refigured narrative models from the past
that were distinctly invested in an embodied Christian self. They
appropriated older narratives of Christian persecution from saints’
tales, martyrologies, and histories of the Roman empire. In doing so,
they resuscitated Catholic models of martyrdom and miracles, and
embodied ideals such as immunity to physical torture and inviolable
virginity. In addition, playwrights turned to a rich tradition of medi-
eval romance that adapted the long history of the Crusades into stories
of seduction and conversion.47 This material included a wide body of
Spanish, Italian, and French prose sources, some of which had been
translated into English. The stage’s tendency to associate conversion
with sexual intercourse extended and reappropriated a tradition of
linking conversion with seduction in medieval romance.48 This romance
convention in turn resonated with the linking of sexual and religious
infidelity in the Hebrew scriptures, whose injunctions against intermar-
riage warned against the dangers of “whoring after other gods.”49 But
English playwrights did not merely reproduce older narrative traditions
in the theatrical medium. Rather, they took great liberties in adapting
older narrative models and making them current by reframing them
with contemporary commercial contexts and settings, or integrating
real-life figures like John Ward and the Shirley brothers. One might
say that they not only adapted older models, but converted them into
something new, infusing them with new functions that responded to an
evolving cultural context. Ultimately, as my discussions of individual
plays bear out, this process of conversion was extremely complex
and sophisticated. It was by means of this complex process that older
embodied models of Christian resistance became imbued with a new
significance that understood Islam to be a racialized threat.
To a large degree, triumphant dramatizations of Christian resistance
and redemption represented the work of cultural fantasy and creative
imagination. But in order to imagine the ramifications of conversion, as
well as the specific terms of resistance and redemption, the stage assimi-
lated the Turkish threat to cultural memories and printed histories of
former kinds of Christian persecution. Not coincidentally, plays featur-
ing early Christian persecutions by Roman pagans and Vandals became
popular around the same time that turning Turk emerged as a popular
theme on the stage. For example, Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr
(1620) and Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier (1619), depicting
the fourth-century Diocletian and fifth-century Vandal persecutions,
respectively, shared stage time in the Red Bull Theatre with topical plays
about Mediterranean travel and trade, such as Thomas Heywood’s
Fortune By Land and Sea (c.1609); John Day, George Wilkins, and
William Rowley’s The Travails of the Three English Brothers (c.1607);
and John Webster’s The Devil’s Law-case (c.1619). Collectively, these
plays participated in an active conversation with plays both inside and
outside their own repertories, revealing shared tropes and resonances
that included depictions of captivity, renegadism, forced conversion
through torture, miraculous conversions to Christianity, and sexual
persecution and resistance.
Early Christian martyr plays offered alternative ways of capitalizing
on the theatrical appeal of religious persecution and conversion, as well
as opportunities for working out anxieties about Turks or identifying
exemplary Christian precedents by foregrounding other settings and
time periods. These martyr plays afforded audiences the pleasure of
experiencing the exotic distance of the past as well as the recognition of
a contemporary resonance with the present. Moreover, they point up
the ways in which plays about Islamic persecution drew upon models
that were invested in the embodiment of identity, and how these models
could be refunctioned to address the integration of a religious and
racial threat of conversion.
A Culture of Religious Unrest
As I suggested earlier in this introduction, dramas of conversion not only

drew upon narrative religious models from the past, but were shaped
by a present culture of highly charged domestic religious unrest. Post-
Reformation England was characterized by controversial Protestant
reforms, lingering Catholic practices and sympathies, and compulsory
as well as unauthorized conversions across the Christian confessional
divide. The ecclesiological and doctrinal compromises that gave the
post-Reformation English church its characteristic if unstable identity
were the subject of ongoing negotiation, debate, and at times heated
controversy throughout the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centu-
ries.50 In turn, the popular stage reflected, reproduced, and commented
upon England’s shifting ecclesiological and doctrinal positions. For
example, in its depiction of Christian resistance and redemption for
its protagonists, the stage drew upon contemporary theological under-
standings and debates about such topics as predestination, valid assur-
ances of grace, and regeneration. Similarly, the terms of conversion
were negotiated in relation to a culture of evolving Protestant reform
and enduring Catholic traditions and residual habits.
Shifting doctrinal interpretations had structural as well as generic
implications. Playwrights assimilated the structures of miracle, conver-
sion, resistance, and redemption – all of which were framed within
specific, though fluctuating doctrines – into the generic structures of
tragedy, comedy, or tragicomedy. Sometimes, a play offered a clear cita-
tion of a specific religious doctrine or responded to a particular moment
in religious politics. For example, A Christian Turned Turke expresses
overt Calvinist sympathies. Its particular view of renegadism as indica-
tive of one’s predestined reprobation to hell speaks to heightened con-
cerns about containing Barbary piracy,51 as well as to contemporary
efforts to buttress the tenets of English Calvinism against a resurgence
of Catholic apologetics in the years following the Gunpowder Plot and
during the beginnings of the Arminian controversy.52 Such a doctrinal
positioning accorded well with a tragic plotline. By contrast, Massinger’s
tragicomic The Renegado assumes a position on doctrinal points such
as lay baptism, penance, and the significance of good works in ways
that seem either distinctly Catholic or proto-Arminian.53 Accordingly,
it may reflect James’s public self-fashioning as peacemaker and his rela-
tive openness toward ecumenical Christian politics, or even the relative
tolerance for Catholics that characterized foreign policy in the later part
of his reign, as he negotiated a Spanish match for his son and sought a
mutually supportive alliance with Spain against Ottoman piracy.54 As
Michael Questier has persuasively argued, religion and politics were
inextricably linked in early modern England, and popular religious
sentiments were often tied to historical shifts in royal policy.55
In a country that itself had undergone conversion three times in
a twenty-five-year period – first from Catholicism to Protestantism
under Henry VIII (and Edward VI), then back to Catholicism with
Queen Mary I’s reign, and finally back to Protestantism during the
reign of Queen Elizabeth – conversion was a heated subject. England’s
denominational instability provided an important context for the kinds
of anxieties that conversion evoked on the stage. Compulsory conver-
sions raised questions about effective methods of enforcement and how
to determine whether a true conversion had taken place. If faith was
spiritual and salvation predetermined, as Protestants tended to argue,
what might constitute a reliable assurance of someone’s faith? As Molly
Murray and Holly Crawford Pickett have shown, the English govern-
ment faced the problem of serial converts – individual subjects like
William Alabaster, Anthony Tyrrell, and Marco Antonio De Dominis,
who repeatedly converted back and forth between Catholicism and
Protestantism, though each time they changed religious affiliation they
swore it was a sincere and final recognition of the true path to salva-
tion.56 The ease and invisibility of conversion made sharp distinctions
between confessional identities difficult, perhaps impossible, to sustain
in practice, despite the fierce polarity of religious rhetoric.
Anxieties about conversion and its resistance to verification were
exacerbated by Protestant attempts to distinguish true faith from
Catholic idolatry. While modern critics have questioned the practical
reality of an unmitigated binary opposition between Protestant spiritu-
ality and Catholic materiality, Protestant polemicists often sought to
cast it in absolute terms.57 Ecclesiastical reforms emphasized the intan-
gibility of Christian faith by targeting the use of iconography, outward
ceremonies associated with the sacraments, and sacred material objects,
such as relics, crucifixes, rosary beads, and altars. The reforms also
targeted certain embodied rituals and practices, ranging from physical
forms of devotion to vowed virginity to transubstantiation. As I discuss
in Chapter 1, Protestant reformers distinguished Protestant spiritual-
ity from Catholic materiality by drawing upon St. Paul’s distinction
between the Jewish practice of circumcision and the notion of a “cir-
cumcision of the heart,” embracing an understanding of conversion
that bound Christians in a spiritual rather than bodily fellowship. For
English Protestants, St. Philip’s baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts
8.36–8) – an event that directly precedes the baptism of St. Paul himself
– served as a powerful symbol of the spiritual powers of baptism. The
extreme physical alterity of the black eunuch is relevant only insofar as
it underscores the extraordinary universalizing potential of Christian
faith. As Protestant sermons on the passage emphasize, it is the faith
behind the sacrament that renders the eunuch’s physical difference
inconsequential. For example, Samuel Hieron’s three sermons on Acts
8, preached in 1613, forcefully distinguish the Protestant understand-
ing of baptism from the outward sacrament itself: “It is the beleeuing
and receiuing of the word that maketh the Sacrament to be effectu-
all.”58 The distinction between inward faith and outward ceremony
continues to emerge throughout the sermon, as when Hieron insists,
“Faith is the tenure by which we hold heauen, Baptisme is but the seale
to confirme it.”59 In some sense, the outward ceremony that marks con-
version assumes a secondary importance analogous to the specificity of
the Ethiopian eunuch himself.
This study aims to address what happens when the visible differ-
ence of the Ethiopian eunuch is brought back into the equation, when,
through his physical embodiment on the stage, he ceases to be a meta-
phor and inhabits a form that we are forced to look at. It addresses what
happened when, as the result of cross-cultural trade and exploration,
figures with similar kinds of eastern and North African alterity entered
the English imagination and began to assume particular geographical,
religious, and cultural significance. It was at this critical juncture that
the post-Reformation turn to spirituality intersected with competing
cultural imperatives to attach specific meaning to non-Christian identi-
ties. The English drama explored the implications of such a powerful
notion of Christian spiritual faith for figures outside the Christian fold
by testing the feasibility of Christianized Muslims. In Othello, Iago
casually references the fact of Othello’s baptism as a way of illustrating
Desdemona’s hold on him: Desdemona could “win the Moor,” he sug-
gests, even “were’t to ask him to renounce his baptism” (2.3.338).60 The
implication is that Desdemona’s power over Othello is so strong that
she could convince him even to renounce his own baptism; of course,
both Desdemona’s persuasions and Othello’s Christian identity turn
out to be fallible in the end. In so matter-of-factly presuming the secu-
rity of Othello’s Christian faith, Iago draws attention to the actual
leap of faith that such a presumption requires. The play seems to ask
whether indeed there might be limitations on who is eligible for the
saving powers of Christian faith. Did the mark of someone’s outward
appearance have something to do with their inner spiritual capacity
after all?
The Stage and Tangible Forms
The early modern stage responded to the problem of faith’s invisibility

by embracing more tangible religious models in order to forge effec-
tive forms of resistance to Islam. Thus, it played up the visual and
performative elements of miracles, ceremonies of conversion, the use of
talismanic objects, and embodied forms of resistance to counter Islam’s
sexual seductions and bodily threats of conversion. In addition, play-
wrights reverted to Roman Catholic models of chastity, martyrdom,
and sacramental ritual in order to physically anchor Christian bodies
against conversion. These tendencies may be explained in multiple
ways. The stage’s reliance on material and embodied religious expres-
sions was partly a function of theatrical entertainment, including the
material aspects of the stage and its visual reliance on the spectacle of
bodily movements and objects. It was also partly a function of the rich
body of Catholic source material and older models that the stage drew
upon in order to imagine efficacious forms of resistance to religious per-
secution. The stage reflected and exploited contradictions in Protestant
practice including a continued reliance on the physical accoutrements
of faith. Positive depictions of Catholic forms may also be explained
through specific political shifts and alliances, particularly those associ-
ated with King James’s religious politics, his softening attitude toward
Spain and other Catholic countries, and hardening opposition to
the Ottoman empire, which rendered certain Catholic content more
acceptable.
But the early modern stage helps us to understand on an immedi-
ate, conceptual level as well the ways that English Protestant identity
fused into a more ecumenical Christian identity. Something about the
very intangibility of Protestant faith prompted an embrace of more
Catholic forms when Islam was thrown into the mix. For one, immate-
rial expressions of faith created a conceptual problem in mounting a
convincing defense to Islam. In addition, the ease of conversion and its
imperviousness to verification fueled a desire to mark it in observable
ways and to stabilize confessional identity. The stage addressed these
anxieties by anchoring Christian resistance through embodied practices
and the use of material objects; through rendering conversion visible
by playing up the importance of outward ceremonies; and through
establishing the difficulty of reversing conversion by associating it with
permanent marks like circumcision or irreversible bodily conditions
like the loss of virginity.
Thus the English stage brought to the surface Protestant reformers’
continuing ambivalence about the role of embodiment and the material
aspects of Christian faith. In particular, it revealed how Islam exac-
erbated uncertainties about the intangible nature of conversion and
brought these uncertainties to a head. The drama’s emphasis on the
body, rather than the spirit, as a means of avoiding Islamic conversion
and contamination not only illustrates the continuing sway of Catholic
models of faith, but affords unique insights into the process by which
racial distinctions emerged between Christians and Muslims in the early
modern period. Ultimately, I offer a new way of understanding the
emergence of race by identifying the ways that Catholic-Protestant ten-
sions between spirit and body took on a racial inflection in the face of
Islam. The stage’s reliance on outward and bodily forms to resist, mark,
and reverse the effects of turning Turk was specifically necessitated by
the sexual and bodily threats that were associated with Islam. In effect,
the threat of turning Turk frequently compelled a complex fusing
together of Catholic and Protestant models, resulting in a notion of
Christian faith that was both spiritually and materially determined.
***
Each of the following chapters focuses tightly on localized readings to

understand how the stage depicts interfaith sexual contact and conver-
sion through gendered models of seduction, resistance, and redemp-
tion. I attend closely to issues of narrative and generic convention,
including playwrights’ appropriation of earlier narratives and genres,
as well as the significance of dramatic generic categories and their
structural implications. Also, in taking account of the repertory system,
rather than privileging individual playwrights, I include discussions of
less canonical plays that were nonetheless popular and influential in
their time. This approach illuminates ways in which early modern plays
cited one another, shared common tropes, and participated in mutual
conversations that are now obscured by the literary canon’s organi-
zation around individual authors and its marginalization of many
non-Shakespearean plays. For example, my second chapter uncovers a
small group of martyr plays performed at the Red Bull Theatre that res-
onate in important ways with “turning Turk” plays performed around
the same time. Similarly, my fourth chapter examines the appearance
of characters who are Knights of Malta in a range of plays performed
between the late 1580s and the 1620s, revealing a connection between
Christopher Marlowe’s canonical Jew of Malta and four other plays
that have largely escaped critical attention. Recognizing the value of
identifying these commonalities while also attending to their individual
historical specificity, I take an approach that is both local and general.
In addition, my readings emphasize how the material and visual ori-
entations of the stage lend themselves to representations of threatened
conversion and its aversion in ways that play up its embodied nature. In
particular, I observe the sometimes surprising ways in which the stage
drew explicitly upon a Catholic history of material objects (relics,
crosses, etc.), rituals and ceremonies (the magic of the sacraments), and
embodied practices (vowed virginity) in order to dramatize Christian
resistance to Islam. Finally, I address the complicated question of
what this investment in outward forms meant in a post-Reformation
culture, revealing not just a holdover of Catholic practices, but the
ways in which Islam reshaped Protestant culture and resignified certain
Catholic practices as “Christian.”
My first chapter focuses on how Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors
(c.1594) and Othello (c.1604) provide a prehistory for the tensions
between spiritual faith and bodily distinction that I argue are brought
to the forefront in later plays by the explicit threat of Islamic conver-
sion. These two plays seem to present an odd pairing: Othello is a
tragedy of difference, while Errors is a comedy of sameness. However,
I argue that the assimilation of a baptized Moor in Othello and the
reunion of two sets of identical twins in The Comedy of Errors have
more in common than one might assume. Both plays are set in eastern
Mediterranean territories (Ephesus and Cyprus) that were central to St.
Paul’s travels and later became important commercial centers and sites
of imperial contest between Christians and Muslims. Drawing upon
this layered history, the plays explore the Pauline ideal of a universal
fellowship of faith, but simultaneously fall back on the tangible materi-
ality of physical differences to stabilize identity against conversion.
Chapter 2 turns to plays performed in the early decades of the 1600s,
after England had established a significant trading presence in the
eastern Mediterranean and turning Turk had become a familiar theme
on the stage. I identify a resonance between early Christian martyr-
dom and strategies for resisting Islam in Thomas Dekker’s The Virgin
Martyr (1620). Two contemporary plays also performed at the Red
Bull Theatre – Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier (1619) and the
anonymous Two Noble Ladies (1622) – reinforce these temporal reso-
nances. Given the geographical correspondence between these plays’
ancient settings and the contemporary Ottoman empire, I demonstrate
how the early modern stage invoked histories of former pagan perse-
cution in order to depict the threat of Muslim persecution. Moreover,
these plays’ idealization of embodied chastity as a strategy of resist-
ance to conversion addresses the particular vulnerability of the female
Christian body to sexual contamination by the Turk. In modeling
Christian resistance through miraculously preserved female virgin-
ity, the plays make visible the Catholic models that informed English
imaginative responses to Islam, as well as the ways in which Islam’s
religious and imperial threats were transfigured on the stage into sexual
and bodily threats.
Chapter 3 further interrogates the gendered implications of Islamic
conversion by considering the stakes of sexual seduction, repentance,
and redemption in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (c.1624). Reading
this play against Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610), I identify
a tension in The Renegado between spiritual redemption and embodied
resistance that divides along the lines of gender. Whereas the Christian
protagonist’s sexual transgression with a Muslim woman is redeemable
through spiritual repentance, the Christian heroine’s chastity is pro-
tected with the aid of a magical relic, revealing her greater vulnerability
to racial reinscription. In other words, the reversibility of the male’s
transgression suggests its receptiveness to a spiritual remedy, whereas
the permanent, embodied consequences of female sexual contamina-
tion compel the use of a Catholic prophylactic. While Catholic objects
and rituals may no longer be authorized in Protestant England, they
reattain authority in the play’s North African setting. I argue that The
Renegado’s selective supplementation of Christian faith with Catholic
materials and rituals speaks not only to the political benefits of merging
Catholic and Protestant interests against the Muslim enemy but, more
specifically, to the ways in which the embodied and sexualized threat of
Islamic conversion necessitated material forms of resistance.
My fourth chapter focuses on the revival of the Knights of Malta
in five plays performed between 1589 and 1621 that allude to territo-
rial battles between Christians and Muslims on the islands of Rhodes,
Malta, and Sicily. Despite the dissolution of the English langue, or
national branch, of the Knights of Malta after the Reformation and
the tarnished reputation of the Knights due to their corsair activities,
the stage resurrects these figures as crusading Christian heroes. I argue
that a range of English plays model the redemption of Christian ren-
egades by re-embracing the Knights’ Catholic vow of chastity. On
the one hand, the vow of chastity helped to cement a commitment to
pan-Christian brotherhood, which symbolized the strategic alliances
between Christian subjects and nations (Catholic and Protestant)
against the common Muslim enemy. But more importantly, this vow
came to signify masculine self-control and gentility in a world of new
cross-cultural challenges. The figure of the chaste Knight of Malta cul-
tivated a model of English masculinity that could both resist and carry
out imperialism in honorable ways. The shared tropes that repeatedly
emerge in these plays also have startling generic implications, revers-
ing the expected outcome of comedy by substituting homosocial
brotherhood for heterosexual marriage.
In the concluding Epilogue, I turn directly to a discussion of genre as
another way of assessing the gendered and racial stakes of Christian-
Muslim conversion. Foregrounding a crucial deviation between
Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso (1516) and Robert
Greene’s stage adaptation (c.1591), I examine what happens when a
romance plot is forced into a tragicomic structure. In Ariosto’s epic
romance, the Indian heroine Angelica forsakes the Christian Orlando
and marries the Muslim Medor, whereas in Greene’s stage adapta-
tion, the heroine is ultimately reunited with the Christian hero. The
tragicomic structure of the play seems to facilitate a trajectory of sexual
and religious transgression followed by redemption. However, closer
inspection reveals that the play’s comic resolution is achieved not
through the heroine’s redemption but through the revelation that her
sexual union with Medor never took place. This elision in turn reveals
the early modern stage’s inability to imagine Christian redemption for a
female character following Islamic sexual contamination. In ultimately
resisting the fungibility of religious conversion, the plays I explore
reveal a slippage between spirituality and embodiment, or religious
and racial identity, which is crucially mediated through their generic
structures.
To return to the question of whether there was a fate worse than
death for a Christian captured by Turks, we need to realize that a
number of unarticulated questions proceed this one. How did the stage
reveal a complex logic of conversion? What role did gender, sexuality,
and genre play in this imagined logic? What were the ties between sexu-
ality, conversion, and race? How did the embodied and racial threat
of Muslims impact Christian fears of conversion? And how were these
fears exacerbated by understandings of Christian faith that emphasized
its spiritual nature?
Examining these questions may help us to perceive unexpected
links as well as important differences between our own world and the
early modern past. In today’s world, anxieties about the invisibility
of religious faith are particularly pronounced in relation to Islamic
“fundamentalists” and the possibility that even white Americans such
as John Walker Lindh (the young Californian captured in 2001 and
renamed Abdul Hamid, or “the American Taliban”) could undergo
such an extreme conversion while not manifesting any outward
changes that a superficial makeover could not reverse.61 In this sense,
the fact that the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were all
dark-skinned Arab men was a comfort to some Americans, provid-
ing a sense of security that inner faith might correspond to a detect-
able outward difference. This discernible correlation helped foster a
stereotype in which Arab racial features became equated with Islam,
which in turn became equated with Islamic “fundamentalism” – thus
discounting Muslims who are “non-fundamentalists” and Arabs who
are Christian. Ironically, it is the invisibility of religious faith and iden-
tification that often leads to racialization of religious identity and its
obfuscations.
Certainly, there is no direct equation between understandings of
race today and centuries earlier, and my point is not to dilute the spe-
cificity of the historical conditions that inform the meaning of race in
any given historical moment. Rather, my interrogation of a racial logic
that emerged from the particular confluence of England’s commercial
encounter with the Ottoman empire, the religious instability of the
Reformation, and early modern theater reveals a set of distant condi-
tions that enables us to see how the invisibility of religious faith might
fuel a desire for outward distinctions. Both in early modern England
and today, the problem with conversion stems not from the invisible
differences that it obscures, but rather from the frightening fungibility
of human identity that it too readily reveals.
Chapter 1
Dangerous Fellowship: Universal

Faith and its Bodily Limits in The
Comedy of Errors and Othello
There is neither Iewe nor Greeke, there is neither bond nor free, there
is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Iesus.
Galatians 3.281
St. Paul’s famous statement of universal fellowship radically proposes

that Christian faith renders indifferent the distinctions of ethnic-
ity, caste, and gender. His contention that Israel’s covenantal bonds
were illegitimately dividing the early Christian church suggested that
all people were eligible for conversion regardless of their earthly sta-
tions. Relegating the rite of circumcision to local custom, St. Paul
replaced the Jewish covenant with a broader universalism whose
basis for inclusion was faith – an intrinsically internal state. As Julia
Reinhard Lupton explains, “Once spiritualized, [God’s covenant] can
also be infinitely extended: No longer the singular badge of Jewish men,
this new circumcision of the heart joins both sexes, all peoples, and all
classes into common fellowship with Christ.”2 This spiritual ideal was
a particular source of tension in early modern England during a time
when the reverberations of the Reformation were still strongly felt and
expanding Mediterranean trade was shifting England’s worldview. On
the one hand, St. Paul’s assertion that outward rituals like circumcision
held no value, that “the only thing that counts is faith which worketh
by loue” (Galatians 5.6), constituted an important touchstone by which
Protestants distinguished themselves from Catholics. It was an ideal fre-
quently alluded to in English sermons by preachers such as John Donne,
William Attersoll, and William Perkins, who embraced the notion of
a “circumcision of the heart” as the true mark of Christianity.3 On
the other hand, however, spiritualized notions of Christian faith and
their promise of effortless conversion created substantial unease in
the decades surrounding the start of the seventeenth century: not only
was England’s own religious identity still in flux – its spirituality still
Dangerous Fellowship 33
very much rooted in material and embodied expressions of faith – but
unprecedented commercial contact between English Protestants and
people of other religious, national, and ethnic origins called into ques-
tion the desirability of a Christian faith that was so undiscriminating
and resistant to verification.
In this chapter I explore early modern tensions associated with
Pauline universalism and cross-cultural contact by juxtaposing two
Shakespearean plays that dramatize the implications of a Christian
faith powerful enough to annul bodily distinctions. The Comedy of
Errors tests the practical ramifications of a universal spiritual fellowship
through its attempts to reunite two sets of brothers who are physically
indecipherable. What happens, the play asks, if bodily differentiation
is relinquished altogether under the presumption that universal fellow-
ship nullifies such marks of difference? Can such a notion of Christian
identity and fellowship exist in a setting where social hierarchies are
informed not only by local cultural norms but by cross-cultural influ-
ences and multiple temporalities? By contrast, Othello explores the
prospect of a subject who is converted to Christianity by baptism
and yet singularly marked by his irreducible physical difference. Does
spiritual faith have the power to embrace all bodies within a Christian
fellowship, and how can its conversion of a black body be assured?
My focus on these two plays, associated with approximate perform-
ance dates of 1594 and 1604 respectively, specifies a historical period
around the turn of the century when in the words of religious historian
R. T. Kendall, “Protestant ecclesiological controversy . . . was at its
height.”4 Even putting aside the influences of international politics
and interfaith conflict, the difficulty of defining English Protestantism
constituted a profound problem within England’s own ecclesiological
circles. Leading into the turn of the century, English clergymen avidly
debated the central Calvinist doctrine of divine predestination, which
held that all humans were divided between election to heaven and
reprobation to hell, and that both fates were completely reliant on the
will of God, impervious to good works or other deeds performed on
earth.5 Such controversy reveals that Calvinism’s division of souls was
a source of contention decades before the more organized Arminian
opposition of the mid-to-late 1620s. Spurred by debates at Cambridge
University in the 1590s, the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 and
subsequent disputes pertaining to the Lambeth Articles reflect on some
level a compulsion to control the universal pretenses of faith by scrupu-
lously nailing down the terms of Calvinist predestination to differentiate
the elect from the reprobate. Disagreements centered on a wide range
of issues, including the relationship between baptism and election (and
who could administer baptism), the doctrine of perseverance (whether
election and reprobation were absolute), the problem of temporary
faith (and how it meant that a reprobate soul could be mistaken for
a saved one), and the proper method of assurance (or how one could
be assured of one’s status as saved or damned).6 Nicholas Tyacke has
influentially identified the Hampton Court Conference as a watershed
event in that it brought anti-Calvinist and predestination disputes into
a national arena, whereas prior to 1604, these disputes had not fully
escaped the confines of universities.7
In both direct and indirect ways, Shakespeare’s plays engage these
topical religious debates: The Comedy of Errors through its symbolic
thematization of baptism and Othello through its negotiation of a
converted soul’s damnation. For my purposes, however, the value of
these two plays lies not in their allegorical rendering of contempo-
rary religious debates, but rather in their imaginative exploration of
more general tensions surrounding the terms for inclusion within the
Christian faith. Shakespeare explores these tensions by testing the limits
of Pauline universalism. Of course, Paul’s theology lay at the root of
many Protestant controversies, and it also offered a powerful rhetori-
cal framework for articulating these controversies. As John S. Coolidge
observed in his 1970 volume The Pauline Renaissance: Puritanism and
the Bible, the ecclesiastical controversies between Elizabethan Puritans
and their conformist opponents were importantly centered on exegeti-
cal interpretations of Paul.8 In many ways, English Puritans understood
their challenge of reconciling the fundamentally mixed body of the
church – comprised of clergy and laypeople, Puritans and Conformists,
elected souls and recipients of a merely common grace – as mirroring
Paul’s challenge of attempting to unify Jews and Gentiles in the early
church. The plays I examine extend Paul’s challenge beyond the con-
fines of the English church, asking how it might be possible to reconcile
Christian universalism with an emerging global economy.
In addition to engaging the unstable climate of domestic religious
politics, both plays engage contemporary global economics through
their Mediterranean settings in Ephesus, Venice, and Cyprus – places of
particular interest to the English because of their commercial aspirations
and concerns about Islamic conversion and imperialism. As I outline in
the Introduction, during the time that Shakespeare’s plays were being
performed in London, English commerce in the eastern Mediterranean
was in the midst of rapid and unprecedented growth.9 The business
of trade brought the English increasingly into eastern territories, and
into contact with a diverse range of religious, national, and ethnic
others. Despite the biblical significance of Ephesus and Cyprus as places
of central importance to the founding of the Christian church, these ter-
ritories were both under the dominion of the Ottoman empire when The
Comedy of Errors and Othello were first written and performed. As a
result, religious conversion assumed a new significance in these geo-
graphical locations as a force that threatened to turn Christians into
Muslims. English privateers’ constant vulnerability to piracy, enslave-
ment, and forced conversion in the dangerous territories of the eastern
Mediterranean compelled a hardening of the limits of Christian faith,
so as to demarcate more certain and permanent distinctions between
English Protestantism and the far greater force of Islam.10 In addition to
the physical vulnerability of English privateers in the largely unpoliced
waters and territories of the eastern Mediterranean, and the general
threat posed by the commercial, territorial, and military dominance of
the Ottoman empire, Islam’s direct theological challenge to Christianity
contributed to English concerns about conversion and related attempts
to shore up religious boundaries.11
The English popular stage participated in the process of negotiating
the physical and spiritual boundaries of faith by representing religious
identity in relation to questions of embodiment. The very conjunction
between religious conversion and sexual turning that is repeatedly put
forward on the stage reflects a compulsion to link religious identity
directly to bodily contamination and reproduction. Conversely, the
stage depicted resistance to conversion by idealizing physical chas-
tity, a bodily state that, while itself virtually unverifiable, appeared
to offer a more tangible assurance of a subject’s spiritual intactness
and purity. As I go on to illustrate in this chapter, The Comedy of
Errors and Othello respond to anxieties about conversion generated
by Christian-Muslim commerce and imperialism by bolstering bodily
distinctions against Pauline universalism to help regulate conver-
sion. This theatrical impulse demonstrates how the universal pretenses
of Pauline faith and its inherent reliance on conversion colluded with
the coalescing of racial distinctions in the early modern imagination.
St. Paul’s Legacy and Renaissance England
If Coolidge demonstrated the centrality of Pauline theology to the

religious controversies of Renaissance England, more recent critics
have mounted their own “Pauline Renaissance” by reassessing the
significance of Paul’s messianic convictions and their communal impli-
cations in the early modern period. In particular, such critics as Julia
Reinhard Lupton and Gregory Kneidel approach Paul’s legacy in the
Renaissance not in terms of interiority but in terms of communal
identity.12 Accordingly, they view Paul’s challenge not as a contest
of spirit against flesh, but as one of community against individu-
als. Lupton characterizes the Pauline struggle in terms of “citizenship,”
an initiation into a civic community that involves a “passage from
the particular to the universal.”13 Both for Paul and for early modern
England, this passage is not simply triumphal, but constitutes a kind of
death experienced through the renunciation of one’s claims to distinc-
tion. Kneidel takes up the problem of Christian universalism somewhat
similarly, understanding its manifestation in the English Renaissance as
an ongoing struggle “to conceptualize an enduring, collective, public
ethic of all believers.”14 His identification of a “struggling universality”
questions the “rejection-replacement” paradigm of biblical typology,
proposing instead a “repetition-remainder” paradigm that empha-
sizes continuities.15 For both Kneidel and Lupton, the Pauline struggle
for universality was as vexed and finally unresolved in Renaissance
England as it was in Paul’s own time: Protestantism’s break from the
past was not triumphal or complete, and neither was Christianity’s
break from Judaism.
These critics’ commitment to the messianic dimensions of Paul’s
thought puts them in dialogue with philosophers such as Giorgio
Agamben and Alain Badiou who appropriate Paul’s legacy for its
modern applications, particularly to mount political critiques of global
capitalism and liberal individualism.16 Badiou emphasizes Paul’s radical
rupture with Judaism, but recasts it as a “militant, rather than an onto-
logical thesis,” serving as a model for modern political revolution.17 For
him, Christ’s resurrection represents the opening of an epoch that is
“neither Judeo-Christian nor Greco-Christian, nor even a synthesis
of the two,” but rather delineates a “third figure.”18 In that the figure
of the resurrected son “filiates all humanity,” it provides the basis for
a universalism that “suspends difference.”19 By contrast, Agamben
theorizes messianic time as the period in “between” the end of Jewish
time (the resurrection) and the beginning of Christian time (the second
coming).20 For Agamben, this time in “between” is characterized as
neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Hebrew nor Greek, because it
designates a period of waiting or deferral. Messianic time, according to
Agamben, does not denote a period of transition or a state of becoming,
since no clear direction is revealed until the second coming. Similarly,
we may live “as if” Jewish law remains, but Jesus’s resurrection makes
this not so.21 Agamben sets out to re-examine Paul’s questions concern-
ing the structure of messianic time with the understanding that “these
questions . . . must also be ours.”22
In his own way, Shakespeare, too, interprets the messianic meaning
of Pauline universalism for his own time and place. He responds to
the way England’s struggling universalism was informed by the par-
ticular cross-currents of domestic religious politics and global econom-
ics. More specifically, Shakespeare demonstrates how, if Paul’s dream
of universality is ultimately unfulfilled in the English Renaissance, its
limits are revealed by the influx of religious others who must be barred
from conversion because their convertibility threatens chaos. Drawing
upon Protestantism’s emphasis on spiritual faith in contradistinction
to Catholic forms of materiality, Shakespeare’s plays characterize
England’s struggling universalism partly as a contest between spiritual-
ized faith and embodied difference. Kneidel usefully insists that Paul’s
own interest in spiritual interiority has been critically overdetermined
– reflecting “the dualistic vocabulary derived from an Augustinian
spirituality that was shared by most medieval and Reformation theo-
logians.”23 This distinction is important: for Paul, the implications of
spiritual faith were centered not in notions of interiority but in com-
munity. At the same time, English reformists were drawn to Paul in
part because his rejection of circumcision and Jewish law resonated
with their rejection of Catholic rituals and their struggle to empower
a Christianity that was driven not by material expression but by faith
itself. (Whether or not Protestant reformers succeeded in their attempts
to disentangle faith from material forms and to what degree such a dis-
tinction is even possible is another question.) The spiritualized nature
of faith was what made it such a difficult proposition, both for a figure
such as Othello who is asked to place faith in something that eludes tan-
gible proof and for an audience that is asked to believe that a Moor’s
spiritual conversion is possible. In focusing on how English Protestants
turned to Paul to distinguish the spiritualized dimensions of faith from
the Catholic forms and practices that they rejected, I emphasize spiritu-
ality not to talk about inwardness or subjectivity but to consider how
faith might serve as the basis for universality.
Renaissance theologians were particularly drawn to Paul’s notion of
baptism, the means by which universalism could be carried out through
a spiritualized conversion. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul describes
baptism as “a circumcision made without hands” (2.11), indicating an
act of faith that supersedes the bodily mark of inherited privilege. His
vision of a universal Christian church relied on baptism’s ability to
extend Christian conversion to the Gentiles of the Roman empire,
replacing the old law of genealogical inheritance with faith in Jesus
Christ. In the Acts of the Apostles, baptism’s capacity to override the
outward differences between Gentiles and Jews is exemplified through
Philip’s baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch – a figure distinguished by
extreme physical alterity. When the eunuch requests to be baptized,
Philip responds simply, “If thou beleuest with all thine heart, thou
maist” (8.37). For English Protestants the baptism of the Ethiopian
eunuch became a particularly loaded symbol. Because the Ethiopian’s
alterity was taking on new, experiential meaning as the result of travel
and commerce, his Christian conversion tested the limits of Pauline uni-
versalism in a new way, illustrating the unfathomable miracle of faith’s
converting properties. As Kim Hall has noted, in the wake of England’s
Reformation, “The whitewashed Ethiopian [became] a ubiquitous
image in Renaissance literature, appearing often in emblem books and
proverbs as a figure of the impossible.”24
Although strict English Calvinists shied away from the sacramental
emphasis of baptism, they were drawn to St. Paul’s interpretation of
baptism as a spiritual replacement for outward marks like circumci-
sion. Late sixteenth-century English sermons abound with references to
baptism’s capacity to convert even the most resilient souls. In a sermon
entitled “The Sinners Conuersion” (1599), Henry Smith recounts from
Luke 29 the story of Jesus’s miraculous conversion of Zaccheus, a
principal Gentile publican, to become “the childe of Abraham”:
Zaccheus was a Gentile, a meruaile to see a Gentile become a Iewe: that is,
to beleeve in Christ. He was a principall Publican. A strange thing to see a
chiefe Customer to giue ouer his office: and hee was rich also: a rare matter
to see a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God: and therefore beholde a
miracle, as if at this daie, the Turke, the Pope, and the King of Spaine, were
at once perswaded to forsake their idolatry and superstition.25
In effect, the conversion of Gentile into (Christianized) Jew is here being
compared to the seeming impossibility of converting Muslims and
Catholics. In another sense, the passage replaces the extreme alterity of
the Ethiopian eunuch with his late sixteenth-century equivalents: “the
Turke, the Pope, and the King of Spaine.” While the uncircumcised
Gentile, the Ethiopian eunuch, and the Catholic or Muslim all con-
stitute historically contingent embodiments of difference, they occupy
positions analogous to one another in designating the absolute outer
limits of Pauline universalism. The attempts of English Protestants like
Smith to apply the tenets of Pauline baptism to their own increasingly
global world brought home both the miracle of Christian faith and its
potential limits.
Significantly, Smith demonstrates the miraculous power of baptism
not just by positing its conversion of Muslims and Catholics, but by
suggesting its capacity to correct a misguided faith in “idolatry and
superstition.” Thus, his formulation incorporates terms specific to
Protestant reform, drawing an implicit connection between idolatry
(or an inability to distinguish material idols from true faith) and the
physical alterity of the black Ethiopian eunuch. Despite Islam’s actual
repudiation of idolatry, Smith conflates Muslims and Catholics as idola-
ters. I want to suggest that his association of these religious others with
the practice of idolatry plays up the impossibility of their conversion
precisely by singling out their inability to apprehend a faith they cannot
see – a logic that, as we will see, also inheres in Othello. Moreover,
Smith’s formulation implies through analogy an association between
the Ethiopian eunuch’s physical alterity and an incapacity to embrace
the spiritual essence of Christian baptism.
In Othello, the irony of the protagonist’s ultimate failure of faith –
his desperate reliance on obtaining ocular proof – is conveyed through
the fact that he is himself marked out by a physical difference that
visually distinguishes him from other Christians. I want to suggest that
this collusion between a reliance on outward proof in lieu of faith and
outward bodily difference is not accidental, that together these condi-
tions capture the very impossibility of Pauline conversion that makes
Christian baptism a miracle. Smith’s sermon helps us to see how the
possibility of Othello’s baptism into the Christian faith suggested a
radical act of conversion that both epitomized the ideal of Pauline fel-
lowship and performed an inversion of deep-rooted cultural associa-
tions. As Thomas Rymer sarcastically observed in the late seventeenth
century, such a radical formulation exceeded the bounds of probability:
“With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter: but Shakespeare
would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor
might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shakespeare would
provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-
Councellor.”26 Somewhat similarly, these improbabilities prompted
Samuel Coleridge to conclude in the early nineteenth century that
Othello must not have been “a negro” after all.27 A bearer of both
incontrovertible blackness and a “perfect soul” (1.2.31), Othello is
the exception that proves the rule of universal Christian faith.28 His
Christian conversion illustrates the extreme limits of Pauline fellow-
ship, making him the essential Pauline subject – a physically differenti-
ated body converted through spiritual baptism, joined by marriage to a
Christian noblewoman, and even appointed to spearhead the Christian
struggle against Islam. If the Ethiopian eunuch constituted the essential
figure of Pauline conversion, Othello was his early seventeenth-century
equivalent.29
By contrast, the physically indecipherable Antipholuses and Dromios
of The Comedy of Errors project in both comic and frightening ways
the practical implications of a universal Christianity that might efface
all bodily difference through faith. While the identical bodies and
names of the twins emphasize the injustice of their separation by dem-
onstrating their inherent fellowship, the play also resists a principle of
human fungibility by constantly depicting the botched or dispropor-
tionate exchanges that are caused by the doublings of identity. As much
as the play struggles toward a Pauline reconciliation, it also struggles
to disentangle the individual identities of bodies that lack outward dis-
tinction. That the two struggles – for reconciliation and differentiation
– merge together and yet are inherently at odds constitutes a central
paradox of the play. Revealing a pattern of chiasmus, this paradox
exemplifies a form that according to Patricia Parker pervades the entire
play, beginning with Egeon’s emblematic description in the opening
scene of the splitting of his family.30 The only way to sort things out
is to get all of the bodies together at once, and yet even when this is
accomplished, it is still impossible to tell the twins apart. The Comedy
of Errors ultimately reveals the need for a type of spiritual fellowship
that forestalls bodily exchange by simultaneously allowing for some
level of outward differentiation to persist. An excess of identical and
indecipherable bodies demonstrates the dangers of a disembodied faith
by revealing the erroneous exchanges and confusions that ensue in the
absence of physical differentiation.
If Coolidge, Lupton, and Kneidel demonstrate how Renaissance
writers adapted Paul’s universalism to work out the relationships
between election and common grace, clergy and laity, Catholic works
and Protestant faith, Shakespeare adapts the logic of Paul’s univer-
salism to consider the question of how travel, trade, and emerging
cosmopolitanism were brought to bear on the ideal of Christian uni-
versalism. Kneidel emphasizes a universalism that for both Paul and
Renaissance writers attempted to bridge time and communities. By
contrast, I want to demonstrate how in the early modern imagination
Christian universalism was not all inclusive, how its very promise of
universal faith depended on certain degrees of exclusion, and how
Shakespeare reveals its limits in particularly canny ways.
Pauline Faith and Mercantile Exchange in The Comedy of Errors
Set in the Mediterranean port city of Ephesus, The Comedy of Errors

is a play permeated with logics of conversion associated with both
Pauline universalism and mercantile trade. In analogizing the conver-
sions associated with universal faith and global commerce, the play
exposes the dangers that emerge when human bodies are subsumed
into these systems of exchange. Ephesus provides a particularly apt
setting for overlaying these temporally and culturally distinct systems of
exchange. In adapting Plautus’s Menaechmi, which is set not in Ephesus
but in Epidamnum, Shakespeare presents an Ephesus that signifies
in multiple and inconsistent ways: it is both pre-Christian and post-
Christian, classical and contemporary, familiar and foreign.31 Perhaps
most overtly, its biblical connection to St. Paul, who spent two years
in Ephesus converting the Gentiles to Christianity, distinguishes it as a
site of religious conversion. Crucial to St. Paul’s, and later St. John’s,
project of enlarging the early Christian church through conversion,
Ephesus became an important center for early Christianity and is one
of the seven cities addressed in the Book of Revelation (2.1–7). Wayne
Meeks surmises that St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, written during his
later imprisonment in Rome, “was intended to be read to new converts
in a group of churches in the southwestern part of the province of Asia
(modern Turkey), as a written substitute for a personal address by the
apostle to the newly baptized.”32 While in Ephesus, St. Paul performed
numerous baptisms and miracles in the name of Jesus Christ, though
he also encountered considerable opposition from Greek idolaters and
Jewish sorcerers (detailed in Acts 19). Such Pauline details re-emerge in
The Comedy of Errors when, for example, the confusions created by
the two sets of twins prompt Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse to
presume that Ephesus is overrun with witches and sorcerers. As Patricia
Parker has observed, the play is virtually riddled with Pauline refer-
ences, both in its language and in its story of two sets of brothers and a
husband and wife who are violently separated and then reunited years
later in a restorative fellowship.33
But, as critics including Linda McJannet and Jonathan Gil Harris have
pointed out, the Ephesus of Shakespeare’s time was also understood to
be a Mediterranean port of the Ottoman empire, a place that Christian
merchants valued for its rich trade but also entered with serious con-
cerns about the safety of their bodies and souls.34 The Comedy of
Errors is explicitly framed within a global mercantile context that
differs markedly from its Plautine sources. In Harris’s estimation, the
play is in fact “more rooted in the world of commerce than any other of
Shakespeare’s.”35 It explicitly alludes to contemporary commerce in the
eastern Mediterranean through casual references to the “Turkish tap-
estry” in Antipholus of Ephesus’s house (4.1.104) and to the pressing
business of sea merchants, like the Second Merchant whose voyage to
Persia is delayed (4.1.4).36 As Arthur Kinney has pointed out, “the busi-
ness of The Comedy of Errors is business”; every character in the play
has some good or service to sell or trade, and the word “gold” occurs
thirty times – far more than in any other Shakespeare play.37 And in
a larger sense, the plot is set in motion by a conflict of commercial
trade. It begins with the ominous capture of Egeon, a merchant of
Syracuse, who is ransomed in Ephesus for violating a mutual trade
embargo between Syracuse and Ephesus. The Duke of Ephesus, Solinus,
sentences Egeon to death unless he can come up with the sum of a
“thousand marks” by five o’clock (1.1.21). For Shakespeare’s audience,
the ransoming of unlawful strangers was of pressing topical concern as
the result of acts of piracy committed by both Muslim and Christian
corsairs. In response to the epidemic of piracy in the Mediterranean,
the English crown constantly renegotiated its trade relations to accom-
modate embargoes and shifting alliances with other European nations
(most notably, the Spanish embargo of 1585–1604). The new charter-
ing of the Levant Company in January of 1592 (two years prior to The
Comedy of Errors’ earliest recorded performance at Gray’s Inn) sought
to pre-empt confusions among rival merchants by incorporating the
Turkey and Venice companies into a single body politic, but numer-
ous reports of piracy, abuse, and human capture recorded between
1592 and 1603 indicate that English ships continued to be involved in
frequent, mutually antagonistic relationships with both Christian and
Ottoman corsairs.38
The contemporary location of Ephesus in the Ottoman empire meant
that it was a place where English merchants and adventurers were
putting their own baptisms to the test by trading and consorting with
Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. If English parishioners were routinely
preached to about St. Paul’s notion of a “circumcision of the heart,”
they were also bombarded with prayers and collections taken up for the
redemption of Christian captives enslaved in Muslim territories. Thus,
for Shakespeare’s audience, the significance of religious conversion in
Ephesus was simultaneously informed by Paul’s teachings on the con-
version of Gentiles and by contemporary reports of Christians being
captured and converted to Islam in the commercial port cities of the
eastern Mediterranean. I argue that the juxtaposition of these temporal
resonances – the Pauline and the contemporary Ottoman East – informs
the bodily exchanges that permeate the play, ultimately revealing an
uneasy conjunction between religious conversion and commodity
exchange. While on the one hand, the play produces amusing physical
comedy through its conflation of the fungibility of commodities with
Pauline conversion, on the other hand, it taps into early modern anxi-
eties about the possibility of conversions away from Christianity, and
the extent to which eastern commerce provided the material conditions
for such conversions to occur. As one early seventeenth-century mer-
chant’s notebook reveals, the kinds of commodities that an English
merchant might encounter in an Ottoman port city ranged in diver-
sity from “Raw and salted ffishe,” “Barbary horses,” “Wax Lonsy,”
and “Corrall” to “Christn Captives of all kindes.”39 The intercultural
contact facilitated by maritime trade in the late sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth centuries made Christian merchants personally vulnerable to
captivity, commodification, and enforced conversion. The ransoming of
“Christn Captives of all kindes” epitomized the dangers of human fun-
gibility, constituting both a profitable human trade and a mechanism
for conversions away from Christianity.
England’s participation in Mediterranean trade also produced more
general concerns about England’s national economic transformation
and engagement in a larger system of global mercantilism. As Daniel
Vitkus has suggested, the threatening concept of conversion encom-
passed not only individuals, but also the “collective cultural and
economic transformation that English society was undergoing . . . in
adopting new procedures and identities based on Mediterranean expe-
rience.”40 Thus, in positing the fungibility of bodies, The Comedy of
Errors exposes not only the potential effects of commerce on individual
identity but also its damaging effects on the nation. In Harris’s reading,
the play incorporates a leitmotif of bodily disease, in particular syphilis,
to address the question of individual/national agency within the global
system of commerce: drawing on competing interpretations of syphilis
as a disease that is both “internally generated and externally con-
tracted,” the play “vacillates between a traditional view of commerce
as a subset of ethics in which the appetitive subject assumed moral
responsibility for his or her transactions and an emergent conception of
commerce as an amoral, global system to whose demands the subject
and the nation have no choice but to submit.”41 The Duke of Ephesus’s
repeated invocation of the “laws” (1.1.4, 25) of international com-
merce that force his hand in sentencing Egeon to death at the opening
of the play reflect his, and by extension Ephesus’s and Egeon’s, contain-
ment within a system of laws that eviscerate individual agency.
Crucially, of course, it is the cutting off of commerce between
Ephesus and Syracuse, rather than its free-flowing operation, that puts a
price on Egeon’s head and sets the stage for potential tragedy. The play
thus opens with the presumption that commercial exchange is positive
and redemptive, raising the expectation that the recommencement of
trade will resolve Egeon’s immediate predicament and heal the various
breaches that afflict his family. Ostensibly oriented against forces of
separation and in favor of restored intercourse and reunion, the play
implies a parallel between the trade embargo and the violent splitting of
Egeon’s merchant ship that separated his twin sons and their two twin
servants, as well as Egeon and his wife, thirty-three years ago. The ter-
mination of commerce works to sustain the division of Egeon’s family
by compelling Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse to suppress their
Syracusan identities while in Ephesus – a precaution that repeatedly
stalls their reunion with their brothers and their father. Thus, the play
suggests that through the restoration of intercourse between Ephesus
and Syracuse, Egeon’s family can be reconciled and the play can end
with comic resolution. In ostensibly aligning the flow of trade with
familial reconciliation, the play suggests a relationship between eco-
nomic and generic form that Valerie Forman argues is characteristic of
tragicomedy; however, the play ultimately problematizes this alignment
by revealing the social inversions (both hilarious and tragic) that ensue
when human conversion follows a logic of economic exchange.42
The Comedy of Errors’ linking together of commercial intercourse
and familial reconciliation offers a clear example of how it analogizes
– and elides – commercial exchange and Pauline fellowship. In impos-
ing a boundary of “citizen” and “alien” among brothers, the trade
embargo references the breach of faith that divided the early church
between Jews and Gentiles, poignantly illustrating St. Paul’s anguish at
the unjustness of such a division through the severing of identical twin
bodies. In addition, Egeon’s narrative of the splitting of the ship that
divides his family invokes the division of the church caused by Jewish
adherence to the “weak and beggerly elements” of the law (Galatians
4.9). Egeon tells of how upon hitting rough waters, he and his wife
sought to secure their newborn twins and the twin servants to the
boat, when his wife “more careful for the latter-born [son] . . . fastened
him unto a small spare mast” (1.1.78–9). The mother’s prioritizing of
care for the younger son may be seen to presage the violent splitting
of the ship and its cargo, for no sooner do Egeon and his wife fasten
themselves “at either end [of] the mast” (1.1.85) than they are
encountered by a mighty rock,
Which being violently borne upon,
Our helpful ship was splitted in the midst;
so that in this unjust divorce of us
Fortune had left to both of us alike
What to delight in, what to sorrow for. (1.1.101–6)
Egeon’s characterization of the splitting of the boat “in the midst”
(or at the “mast”) and the separation of the twins as a most violent
and “unjust divorce” suggests the sundering of the cross that St.
Paul aspired to heal by unifying Jew and Gentile under one Christian
faith. Just as St. Paul sought to unify the church by substituting the law
of Jesus (“Loue thy neighbour as thyselfe,” Galatians 5.14) for the old
Jewish law that divides, the play seeks resolution by lifting the law of
the embargo and reconciling the separation of brothers and husband
and wife, reuniting them into one family.
And indeed, The Comedy of Errors concludes with an overt refer-
ence to Pauline reconciliation. The two sets of twins and Egeon and
his wife are reunited in a priory, and in the final lines of the play, the
two Dromios resolve to exit hand in hand, rather than eldest first:
“We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let’s
go hand in hand, not one before another” (5.1.424–5). Leading up to
this point, however, the belief shared by all the characters that only
one Antipholus and one Dromio exist in Ephesus, and the inadvertent
exchanging or substitution of their bodies that ensues, creates consider-
able confusion and violence. In presenting a series of exchanged bodies
and identities that lead not to harmony or reconciliation, but to chaos
(comic for the audience, but torturous for the characters), the play
exposes the social impracticalities of Pauline universalism, as well as its
residual production of confusion and violence.
The multiple confusions of the twins’ identities result in a series of
uneven commercial exchanges in which the intended recipient winds
up either short or vastly overcompensated. For example, Angelo the
goldsmith mistakenly gives a chain to Antipholus of Syracuse, and then
unsuccessfully seeks payment from Antipholus of Ephesus; Angelo is
thus unable to pay his debt to another merchant. Adriana mistakenly
gives money to Dromio of Syracuse for Antipholus of Ephesus’ bail;
Dromio of Syracuse then delivers this money to the wrong Antipholus,
and as a result Antipholus of Ephesus cannot be ransomed. Antipholus
of Ephesus beats Dromio of Ephesus for bringing him a rope instead of
the 500 ducats he mistakenly ordered Dromio of Syracuse to retrieve
from his house. In the end, Antipholus of Syracuse winds up with
the chain, the 500 ducats, and dinner at the house of Antipholus of
Syracuse, while Antipholus of Ephesus winds up in debt for a chain he
did not receive, in debt to both his wife and the courtesan to whom he
promised the chain, arrested and bound for his debt to the goldsmith,
and locked out of his own house. In short, the physical misplacements
of the gold chain illustrate the figuratively broken chain of exchange
caused by the twins’ indecipherability.
Over and over again, the play hypothesizes the satisfaction of unpaid
debts through the ransoming of bodies. Antipholus of Syracuse and
Antipholus of Ephesus are arrested and bound for failing to pay Angelo
for the chain, and both of the Dromios receive repeated beatings,
or “marks” upon their bodies, for appearing to carry out uneven
exchanges. But in repeatedly exposing the insufficiency of bodies to
satisfy debts, the play ultimately resists the conversion of bodies into
exchange value. Foreshadowing Shylock’s inability to extract exactly
one pound of flesh from Antonio’s body in The Merchant of Venice
(1596), the physical bondage of the two Antipholuses does not ade-
quately compensate for the payment of the chain, and neither do the
“marks” upon the Dromios’ bodies make up for the discrepancies in
value for which they appear to be responsible. Indeed, in a play that
centers so crucially on the activity of exchange, it is curious that nearly
every debt remains unsatisfied in the end. Angelo never does receive
his payment for the chain, and the merchant to whom he is indebted
never makes it onto his ship; Egeon is forgiven his debt for trespassing
in Ephesus; the arresting officer never receives payment for his captives’
release; and Antipholus of Ephesus is never returned his gold.
Moreover, though the bodies and names of the twins are identical,
their identities prove not to be fungible. The play’s exaggerated por-
trayal of their physical similarities seems at first to emphasize the injus-
tice of their separation and the inevitable force of their oneness. Even
the marks that normally distinguish one identical twin from another
are in the case of the Dromios identical, making their bodies inde-
cipherable even to the most familiar set of eyes. As Nell the kitchen
maid reveals, her lover who is Dromio of Ephesus bears the very same
“privy marks . . . [including] the mark of [his] shoulder, the mole in
[his] neck, the great wart on [his] left arm” that Dromio of Syracuse
bears (3.2.126–7). However, the play ultimately argues for the value
of physical distinctions, and the essential correlation between physi-
cality and identity, by showing how such indecipherability enables all
manner of ‘unnatural’ things to happen. The temporary undoing of
the twins’ individual identities results in a wife unable to recognize her
own husband, a man being locked out of his own house, a lover unable
to recognize her fiancé, masters who cannot recognize their servants,
servants who cannot recognize their masters, and a rope that costs 500
ducats. In short, it results in a world turned outside in, creating a series
of estrangements that the characters seek in vain to explain through
sorcery or madness.
If St. Paul explicitly defined Christian universalism against the bodily
distinctions and social divisions privileged by ancient Jewish laws
governing diet, exogamy, and circumcision, The Comedy of Errors
considers and ultimately resists the evisceration of contemporary social
customs that divide individuals on the basis of such determinants as
gender and class. Instead, it demonstrates the necessity of retaining the
divisions that define identity, and grounding these divisions in bodily
distinctions, precisely by dramatizing the unappealing consequences
of mistaken identities and inverted social hierarchies. To do so, the
play reappropriates biblical verses and commentaries intended to illus-
trate the universalizing power of Pauline fellowship. For example, it
refigures the New Testament metaphor of a “knock upon the door”
to expose the danger of allowing the wrong person to enter one’s
house. In the New Testament, this metaphor emphasizes the accessibil-
ity of Christian conversion or redemption to all willing parties: accord-
ing to Matthew 7.7, “knocke, & it shalbe opened unto you”; and
Revelation 3.20, “Behold, I stand at the doore, and knocke: if any man
heare my voice, and open the doore, I will come in vnto him, and will
Sup with him, and he with me.” In turn, early modern sermons such as
Thomas Jackson’s The Converts Happines (1609) draw on these pas-
sages to emphasize the accessibility of conversion and redemption to
all human souls and repentant sinners. Jackson references John’s first
vision and how it compelled him to write to the Gentile churches in
Asia Minor, rather than the churches in Judea. According to Jackson,
John chose to convey his message to the new converts in Asia Minor “to
signify that now the kingdome of God was come to the Gentiles, and
that the partition wall being broken downe, the Gentiles were admit-
ted & adopted into the fellowship of God’s people.”43 By contrast, in
The Comedy of Errors Adriana’s opening of her door to Antipholus
of Syracuse results in the transgression of the “partition wall” by a
stranger. That the rightful master has been displaced from his house by
a stranger who is in Ephesus “but two hours old” directly alludes to the
sacrament of baptism that indiscriminately converts strangers into citi-
zens (2.2.139). The play thus illustrates how such access to conversion
leads to the undoing of identity and social organization. In addition, the
stranger’s displacement of the master demonstrates how the “undivid-
able, incorporate” union of marriage, referenced several lines earlier by
Adriana, is vulnerable to infiltration (2.2.113).
Just as the play reappropriates the metaphor of “a knock upon the
door” to illustrate the risks of indiscriminate access to conversion, it
employs water as a metaphor in two separate instances to illustrate
the dangers of a notion of identity that is not demarcated from that
of others. This metaphor references both the water of baptism that
in Paul’s rendering washes away the blood of circumcision, erasing
the bodily distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and the oceans that
divide human beings into separate nations, religions, and ethnicities. In
contrast to St. Paul’s assurance to an audience of newly baptized
Gentiles in his letter to the Ephesians that “There is one body and one
spirit . . . One Lord, one Faith, one Baptisme” (4.4–5), The Comedy of
Errors problematizes the anonymity and razing of individual identity
conferred by baptism. After being confronted with the possibility that
her own husband does not know her, Adriana compares the impossibil-
ity of depositing “a drop of water in the breaking gulf” and retrieving
“unmingled thence that drop again” to the commingling of husband
and wife in one body (2.2.117–18). In one sense, her use of this meta-
phor attests to and celebrates the notion of a husband and wife’s invio-
lable union; but in another sense, the fluidity of identity that makes
this commingling possible is also precisely what enables a stranger to
displace her husband. That Adriana conceives of the union of marriage
as not merely spiritual but distinctly physical is emphasized through her
description of how she is physically contaminated by her (presumed)
husband’s failure to recognize her:
I am possessed with an adulterate blot.
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;
For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion. (2.2.131–5)
What begins in her speech as a positive celebration of the inseparable
union of marriage devolves into images of bodily contamination and
contagion.
Similarly, Antipholus of Syracuse employs the metaphor of water
to describe how his pursuit of fellowship leads to the tragic loss of his
own identity:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them unhappy, lose myself. (1.2.35–40)
Like Adriana’s invocation of water as a metaphor for the unity of
marriage, Antipholus’ description of questing for his “fellow” leads
to unhappiness and loss. Both Adriana and Antipholus describe the
merging of a drop of water with a larger body of water as a “fall”: in
Adriana’s terms, “as easy mayst thou fall / A drop of water in the break-
ing gulf” (2.2.116–17). Thus, while the play opens by identifying famil-
ial separation as the source of tragedy that must be righted, it maps a
quest for reconciliation that produces as much sadness and loss as it
does laughter. In comparing his identity to “a drop of water,” fungible,
anonymous, and inseparable from the billions of other drops in the
ocean, Antipholus of Syracuse describes the hazards of bodies without
distinction, and a world without borders. While the play’s Pauline
resonances suggest that its resolution lies in the merging of brothers
into one Christian body, it clearly exposes the dangers of such unifica-
tion. Until the individual identities of the Antipholuses and Dromios
are sorted out, the identical bodies in Ephesus create havoc and discord,
rather than harmony and fellowship.
The ending of the play is in some ways far less settled than it
might appear. Debts remain unpaid and mistaken identities prevail.
Antipholus of Ephesus fails to recognize his father, and even Egeon
himself cannot tell his sons apart. Wouldn’t everyone be better off if
Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse simply returned to Syracuse? In
effect, the splitting of Egeon’s ship upon the rock that separated his
family served a useful purpose by rendering the two Antipholuses
and the two Dromios singular within their own respective communi-
ties. Contrary to its rhetoric of reconciliation, the play concludes by re-
establishing this separation: its final denouement consists of untangling
the four separate identities that are imposed on two bodies. Ultimately,
the reunion of the brothers leads to comic resolution, but the practical
significance of their reunion is not a merging of identity but the expo-
sure of the twins’ separate and distinct identities. Thus, it is the recogni-
tion of the differences that distinguish one twin from another, rather
than their sameness, that resolves the play. In insisting upon the imprac-
ticality of razing human distinctions, The Comedy of Errors counter-
acts the logics of Pauline universalism and transnational commerce that
converge in late sixteenth-century Ephesus.
Shakespeare’s Leap of Faith? Othello’s Unconvertible Difference
First performed around 1604, Othello presupposes the Christian con-

version of a black Moor, who then goes on to transgress a variety of
cultural boundaries by marrying a Christian woman, commanding trust
and respect from the Venetian Senate, and leading a Christian army
against the Muslim enemy. I argue that this representation raises, rather
than answers, the question of whether a Moor can be converted and
assimilated into Christianity, and in doing so, exposes the profoundly
unsettled relationship between faith and the body in early modern
England. In imagining the scope and limits of Christian faith, Othello
explores whether Christian faith can spiritually transcend a black body
and explicitly links conversion to embodiment by positing a conjunc-
tion between inner faith and outer difference. In recent years, critics
have been divided over whether Othello is a play about race or whether
such an interpretation reflects understandings of race anachronistically
imposed by modern readers. In focusing not on Othello’s racial differ-
ence, but on the question of his Christianity, I sidestep this debate to
some degree while at the same time considering how questions of reli-
gious conversion might themselves reveal an early coalescing of racial
categories. If Othello ultimately racializes its black protagonist, it does
so in part by negotiating relationships between sight and belief, tangible
proof and intangible essence, outward difference and inner faith. Simply
put, the play asks: is a black body eligible for Christian redemption?
In an article entitled “Shakespeare’s Leap” Stephen Greenblatt sug-
gested that Othello reflects a leap of faith through its complex and
multidimensional portrayal of the Moor – a portrayal that exempli-
fies the “touch of the real” by fusing representation with “the vivid
presence of actual lived experience.”44 His linking of Othello with a
leap of faith is apt, but it is a leap that ultimately fails, straining early
modern belief precisely by pushing the boundaries of who can exist
among the believers. In Renaissance England, Moors were frequently
the subjects of literary fables, travelers’ tales, and stage plays, and
were at least occasionally present on the streets of London, though as
Queen Elizabeth’s 1596 and 1601 edicts for the expulsion of “negars
and blackmoors” suggest, they were neither inconspicuous nor fully
integrated into English culture.45 And yet, Othello posits an assimila-
tion of the Moor into Christian society that is in some ways remarkably
seamless. The play’s initial setting in Venice, a vital European trading
port and home to many non-Christian foreigners including Moors,
Turks, and Jews, provided a site through which to imaginatively project
London’s own future, given its growing participation in transnational
trade and its increasingly porous borders. However, even in the context
of Venice’s comparatively cosmopolitan culture, Othello’s assimila-
tion seems exceptional. Unlike Shylock, who remains a social outsider
despite his forced conversion to Christianity at the end of his trial,
Othello’s conversion appears to go unquestioned.
As observed in the Introduction to this book, Othello acknowl-
edges its protagonist’s baptism in a way that takes for granted both
its unremarkable nature and its efficacy. Specifically, Iago offers the
hyperbolic example of undoing Othello’s baptism as a way to describe
Desdemona’s immense power over him. Desdemona could “win the
Moor,” he suggests, even “were’t” to ask him
to renounce his baptism,
All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,
His soul is so enfettered to her love
That she may make, unmake, do what she list,
Even as her appetite shall play the god
With his weak function. (2.3.338–43)
In drawing a parallel between the “seals and symbols” that confirm

Othello’s baptism and the “love” that makes Othello’s “soul” “enfet-
tered” to Desdemona, Iago suggests an equation between Othello’s
conversion to Christian faith and his faith in Desdemona’s love. As
the play progresses, Desdemona’s love comes to stand in for Othello’s
Christian faith: his sustained faith in her mutual love and fidelity – later
equated with her “chastity” – constitutes an index of the authentic-
ity of his conversion. But crucially, both Othello’s Christian faith and
Desdemona’s chastity are entities that elude visual corollary. While
Iago’s point above is to acknowledge the security of Othello’s Christian
identity by equating the great unlikelihood of its undoing with
Desdemona’s immense power over him, it is significant that the play
does not allow us to see Othello’s baptism, but rather asks us to accept
it as a matter of faith. Similarly, we do not get to see the courtship
that prompts Desdemona to fall in love with Othello. Instead, Othello
narrates the details of their courtship in answer to Brabantio’s charge
that Desdemona could not possibly fall in love with a man such as
he. Specifically, what defies belief is the possibility that Desdemona
could “fall in love with what she feared to look on” (1.3.99).
The play’s refusal to supply visual evidence of both Othello’s
Christian conversion and Desdemona’s seduction by Othello is offset
by the constant visual reminder of the thing that makes both conver-
sions so difficult to believe – Othello’s physical difference. While we
must simply have faith in Othello’s conversion through baptism and in
Desdemona’s conversion from “a maiden” “of spirit so still and quiet
that her motion / Blushed at herself” (1.3.95–7) to one who “falls in
love with what she feared to look on,” the thing we unequivocally do
get to see is the outward difference of Othello’s black body. Thus, in
implicitly appropriating a Pauline notion of universal faith that eschews
an outward corollary, the play simultaneously uses the visual element
of performance to exploit the audience’s reliance on sight as an index
of belief.
Seeing (Beyond) the Black Body
Compounding the dramatic impact of Othello’s bodily presence on

the stage are the graphic descriptions of his offensive blackness and
its sexual threat to Desdemona that visually mark him even before his
first entrance. These threatening images of bestiality and miscegenation
conjured by Iago and Roderigo – “an old black ram / Is tupping your
white ewe!” (1.1.87–8); “the devil will make a grandsire of you” (90);
“you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse” (110) – offer
stark visual contrasts to Othello’s declaration of his “perfect soul” in
the following scene. Upon being warned of Brabantio’s intention to
accuse him before the Senate of stealing his daughter, Othello both
refuses to hide his body and makes a case for the persuasive force of his
intrinsic virtues:
Not I, I must be found.
My parts, my title and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.30–2)
His explicit willingness to “be found” calls attention to the visual

presence of his physical body, and his repetition of “I, I” emphasizes
how he in fact distinguishes himself from others (“not I”) by his very
refusal to conceal his body (“I must be found”). At the same time, he
suggests that despite the evidence of this conspicuous body – the only
black body among many white bodies – his “parts,” his “title,” and
his “perfect soul” shall exonerate him from blame. These components
of his identity refer respectively to personal “qualities and attributes,”
social “rights or claims,” and a “faultless” or “immaculate” spiritual
status.46 In effect, they express his merits in intrinsic, social, and sal-
vational terms. Thus, Othello’s lines suggest that his intangible quali-
ties will outweigh the more tangible effects of his bodily presence. In
defending himself against Brabantio’s charges, Othello asks that both
the Venetian Senate and the audience of the play make a leap of faith, as
Desdemona has, by valuing his unseen virtues over the blatant spectacle
of his physical difference.
Although the negative images of blackness propounded throughout
the play by Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio were not the only charac-
teristics associated with Moors in the early modern period, I want to
suggest that their visual force directly contributed to the theatrical
challenge of representing a Moor with a “perfect soul” (1.2.31). These
visual descriptions become inseparable from the constant reminder of
Othello’s physical difference whenever he appears on the stage. The
play references this effect when, upon Othello’s entrance to the Senate,
along with Brabantio, Cassio, Iago, Roderigo, and officers, the Duke
immediately greets Othello before turning apologetically to Brabantio
to say, “I did not see you” (1.3.51). The Duke’s remark simultaneously
registers the fact of Othello’s physical conspicuity and his respected
authority (at the expense of Brabantio), the combination of which
constitutes a paradox that is returned to throughout the play. Writing
in 1812, Charles Lamb drew attention to how the impact of Othello’s
blackness manifests itself in the difference between reading the play and
seeing it performed: “I appeal to everyone that has seen Othello played
whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello’s mind in his colour;
whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the court-
ship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the
actual sight of the thing did not overweigh all that beautiful compro-
mise which we make in reading.”47 While Lamb certainly speaks from
a position informed by his own cultural racism, I suggest that even in
1604 Shakespeare’s play was not innocent of the way the performed
spectacle of Othello’s blackness could be used to exploit a distinction
between sight and belief.
Desdemona’s own explanation for her attraction to Othello acknowl-
edges the perceived contradiction between his external and internal
qualities. Making her case to the Senate to accompany her husband to
war, she soberly explains,
I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,
And to his honours and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate (1.3.253–5)
She thus proposes a crucial opposition between sight and belief, which
informs her perception of inner virtue over outer body. Whereas a per-
son’s “visage” refers to their “face” or “assumed appearance” (OED 1,
8), the “mind” refers to a “mental faculty,” which is “regarded as being
separate from the physical” (OED 19a). In addition, Desdemona’s
description of “consecrat[ing]” her “soul and fortunes” to Othello’s
“honours and valiant parts” – explicitly disembodied rather than
embodied entities – emphasizes the spiritual aspects of marriage rather
than its union of two bodies. At the same time, Desdemona certainly
does not disavow her physical attraction to Othello, and even boldly
prefaces her case to accompany him to war by insisting, “I did love
the Moor to live with him” (1.3.249). But I want to suggest that
Desdemona’s ability to see “Othello’s visage in his mind” is all the
more remarkable because of her simultaneous willingness to embrace
his physical self. Desdemona’s ability to see beyond Othello’s black
body to his inner virtue is testimony to her faith in that which cannot be
seen, a capacity that directly contrasts with Othello’s ultimate demand
for ocular proof.
Huston Diehl has similarly observed how the play’s exploration
of the relationship between blind faith and ocular proof resonates
with the religious controversies of the Reformation.48 She explains,
“By demonstrating both the insufficiency of visible evidence and the
difficulty of sustaining faith in what cannot be seen, Shakespeare’s
play thus addresses fundamental questions about seeing, knowing,
and believing, questions that are at the heart of sixteenth-century
religious reforms.”49 But whereas Diehl interprets Othello’s demand
for ocular proof as “a typical response to the renewed emphasis in
reform culture on faith” (reflecting Protestantism’s continued reliance
on material forms), I suggest that Desdemona’s way of seeing estab-
lishes a corrective counter to Othello’s inability to distinguish between
misleading materiality and the truth of an essence unseen. In this way
the play models a contrast between proper and improper forms of
belief. Robert N. Watson has made a similar point about the contrast
between Desdemona’s faith and Othello’s faithlessness, arguing that
in allegorizing a doctrinal dispute over the necessity of faith, the play
amounts to “Protestant propaganda.”50 What I am suggesting is not
that Othello should be read as Catholic (or that the play should be
read as Protestant), but rather that the play draws on distinctions of
sight and belief made pertinent by the Reformation to consider whether
subjects outside the Catholic-Protestant divide are eligible for conver-
sion. Othello’s failure of faith, I argue, is singled out by his black-
ness. By contrast, Desdemona’s undying faith is distinguished by her
ability to see beyond the black body. As I go on to demonstrate, the
significance of blackness as the subject and object of the faith being
tested is crucial here.
Of course, Othello does not spontaneously lose his faith in
Desdemona’s love and develop an incapacity for faith in the intangible,
but is explicitly converted by Iago. And, in contrast to the invisibility
of his baptism and seduction of Dedemona’s love, Othello’s seduction
and conversion by Iago are explicitly staged. By communicating a series
of disturbing inferences, Iago undoes Othello’s faith in Desdemona’s
love and substitutes in its place his own false loyalty and devotion. The
exchange of “sacred” vows between Othello and Iago in 3.3 simulates
not only a marriage ceremony but also a reconversion ceremony in
which Othello withdraws his faith in Desdemona’s love and recom-
mits his faith to Iago (3.3.464). As the agent of Othello’s conversion,
Iago turns Othello’s faith precisely by convincing him that his black-
ness matters, a condition that, in turn, “turn[s]” Desdemona’s “virtue
into pitch” (2.3.355). Iago’s persistent inferences about Desdemona’s
infidelity rely on the presumption that Othello’s blackness obviously
precludes the possibility of her genuine love. While Othello initially dis-
misses the suggestion, saying, “she had eyes and chose me” (3.3.192),
this shift in his attention quickly leads him to an authorization of visual
proof as the only reliable index for truth: “No, Iago, / I’ll see before I
doubt, when I doubt, prove” (3.3.192–3). In this way, Iago helps facili-
tate a connection between somatic difference and reliance on visual
proof that is progressively reinforced throughout the play. Ultimately,
of course, Othello is converted to doubt not by means of ocular proof
but by Iago’s conjuring of images through spoken words. Nonetheless,
Othello’s vow to rely on ocular proof stands in stark contrast to the
intangible nature of Desdemona’s love and, by extension, her chas-
tity. Thus, Iago’s reconversion of Othello consists of converting him
from a reliance on intangible faith to a reliance on tangible proof.
In addition, Iago convinces Othello that he cannot trust the things
he thinks he sees, while simultaneously reminding him of the evidence
of his physical difference. He points, for example, to the deceptive
way that Desdemona first responded to his looks: “When she seemed
to shake, and fear your looks, / She loved them most” (3.2.210–
11). Again, Iago implies that Desdemona’s response to Othello’s
outward difference cannot be trusted, but what is certain is that this
difference is not insignificant. By linking Othello’s blackness to an
incapacity to properly interpret signs, Iago destabilizes Othello’s sense
of Christian identification. His undoing of Othello’s faith in his own
ability to read Desdemona reveals, through Othello’s very susceptibility
to such conversion, the failure or impermanence of his initial conver-
sion to Christianity. Indeed, Iago persuades Othello to doubt his fellow-
ship with the Christian community by casually inferring his outsider
status as though it were a foregone conclusion, and appoints himself as
a reliable translator of Venice’s “country disposition” (3.3.204). This
suggestion of Othello’s insecure place in the Christian society starkly
contrasts with his prior sense of confidence in his position as not just
the military but the moral leader of the Christian army. Such confi-
dence is casually exemplified when Othello reprimands his brawling
men, “Are we turn’d Turks?” (2.3.166), clearly aligning himself with
their Christian identity. In short, Iago convinces him that his blackness
constitutes an insuperable difference that bars him from both Christian
fellowship and Desdemona’s genuine love.
Ambiguous Origins
Significantly, Othello’s native origins are never definitively established

in the play; at various times he is tenuously linked to the eastern and
African geographies of Turks and Muslims, and at other times to the
New World and its pagan cannibals. In fact, the “travailous history”
(1.3.140) that Othello narrates before the Senate suggestively ties him
to a range of discursive histories, including that of the romance or
renegade adventurer, passing “battles, sieges, [and] fortunes” (131)
and negotiating “hair-breadth scapes” (137);51 that of biblical Exodus,
characterized by “flood and field” (136), “antres vast and deserts idle,
/ rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven” (141–2);
that of the noble African convert and Leo Africanus’s Historie of
Africa;52 that of a Christian captive “taken by the insolent foe / And
sold into slavery” (138–9); and that of classical and medieval travelers’
tales such as Pliny’s History of the World and Mandeville’s Travels,
featuring “cannibals that each other eat” (144), “the Anthropophagi”
(145), and “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders”
(145–6). In turn, these discursive histories suggest a range of geographi-
cal, ethnic, and religious identities, including the Israelite Judean, the
Muslim or pagan African, and the pagan “cannibal.”
Othello’s identification as a Moor lends further complication, rather
than clarity, to his identity. Throughout the play, his Moorishness per-
sists as the single most prevalent means of his identification by others,
often superseding the use of his name. He is occasionally referred to as
“general” or “lord,” but far more frequently as “the Moor.” Despite
the consistency of this label, as critics have shown, the specific meaning
of Moorish identity was highly unstable in early modern England in
that it designated numerous, often incongruous categories of geograph-
ical, national, religious, and embodied distinction.53 As Emily Bartels
incisively sums up, “The ‘notorious indeterminacy’ that seems to mar
the Moor’s story is, in fact, essential to its core . . . the Moor is first and
foremost a figure of uncodified and uncodifiable diversity.”54 Dramatic
representations of Moors reflected a variety of characteristics and
origins.55 The characteristics attached to Othello alone suggest a wide
range of positive and negative stereotypes: he is referred to as “lascivi-
ous Moor,” “valiant Moor,” “brave Moor,” “warlike Moor,” “lusty
Moor,” “noble Moor,” “dull Moor,” and “cruel Moor.” Despite
their diversity, none of these modifiers for Moorishness is considered
unfamiliar or beyond the pale.
In addition, the figure of the Moor evoked specific concerns about
conversion, and straddled the line of distinction between legitimate
Christian conversion and insincere or chronic turning. Such ambigu-
ity was partly informed by the legacy of the Spanish Moriscoes – a
discursive history associated with chronic illegitimate or superficial
conversions – and the (complexly related) literary idealization of the
“noble Moor” in the romance and classical traditions.56 Iago draws on
this range of extremes as they suit his own agenda when appealing to
Othello and other characters. For example, when first warning Othello
of Desdemona’s infidelity, Iago expresses concern for Othello’s “free
and noble nature,” which makes him particularly vulnerable to abuse
(3.3.202). Echoing his previous remark to Roderigo in which he alludes
to Othello’s “free and open nature” (1.3.398, italics mine), Iago’s
substitution here of “noble” for “open” reflects the unstable nature
of Moorishness – its enduring “noble” integrity versus its change-
able “openness.” This instability pervades Othello’s characterization
throughout the play. He remains a figure impossible to pin down: “a
wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (1.1.134–5), and yet
simultaneously the “Moor of Venice” (italics mine), both black and
Christian, a foreign imposter and a privileged officer of the state.57
The unstable meaning of “Moor” and the play’s lack of specifi-
city about Othello’s origins have led critics to consider the implica-
tions of reading Othello as a Muslim Turk as opposed to an African
pagan. Most notably, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Daniel Vitkus have
exposed the long-held critical assumption of Othello’s pagan African
roots – often implicitly conflated with his blackness – by calling atten-
tion to the possibility of his Muslim origins and his reversion to Turkish
tyranny at the end of the play.58 For Lupton, Othello’s possible religious
origins as a Muslim constitute a separate and unrelated threat from that
of his skin color. She suggests that the notion of a circumcised, Muslim
Othello was in fact much more threatening for early modern audiences
than that of a darker-skinned, pagan Othello, because of the imperial
threat associated with the Ottoman empire and the theological links
between Christianity and Islam. Whereas paganism was understood to
be pre-Christian, Islam stemmed from the “same Abrahamic lineage as
Christianity,” and was thus perceived by English audiences to be more
resistant to conversion.59 This recognition of Othello’s possible Muslim
origins importantly complicates our understanding of his difference and
of the complexities attendant upon his Christian conversion.
Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the play is explicitly
ambiguous about its protagonist’s origins and refuses to associate
him with any one religion or geography. This ambiguity may suggest
that the spiritual conversion of baptism renders indifferent the par-
ticular specificity of Othello’s past, or that the opposition critics
have constructed between paganism and Islam is overdetermined. As
Ania Loomba asserts, “It is impossible, but also unnecessary, to
decide whether Othello is more or less ‘African/black’ than ‘Turkish/
Muslim.’”60 For one thing, “African” did not necessarily mean non-
Muslim, as these binary oppositions imply. But more significantly,
the play refuses to offer conclusive evidence of Othello’s origins and,
in thus sustaining the possibility that he could have been either pagan
or Muslim, reveals how both religious identities could be associated
with dark skin. Blackness did not foreclose the particular threat associ-
ated with a circumcised Muslim and in some cases reinforced it. Even
though, as Burton puts it, “Othello’s skin color” could potentially
“distract us from the possibility of his more significant religious differ-
ence,” it is also the case that skin color could function as an indication
of religious difference in the early modern period.61 Considering the
vast range of geographies and histories to which Othello is attached
throughout the play, perhaps the only thing constant or unequivocal
about his identity is the very fact of his blackness – a quality that in the
words of Dympna Callaghan had the capacity “to intensify, subsume
and absorb all aspects of otherness.”62
Skin Color and Marking Faith
It is worth underscoring the point that whereas Othello’s potential cir-

cumcision is not directly evidenced in the play, the fact of his blackness
is repeatedly evidenced through multiple verbal allusions as well as by
the visual spectacle of his body. I intend this not as an argument for
reading Othello as black/pagan instead of Muslim, but rather to draw
attention to the difference between locating religious alterity in the sign
of blackness and in that of circumcision. In effect, the play privileges
an undeniable and visible marker of difference rather than an uncertain
and, for all intents and purposes, invisible marker. Clearly, the stage
could not easily allow (if at all) for circumcision to be visibly apparent,
but even if it could, it seems important to recognize that the mark of
circumcision is categorically distinct from that of skin color. Whereas
Othello could not hide his blackness without concealing his entire
body, the mark of circumcision is always (under normal circumstances)
concealed from public view. Moreover, as Lupton points out, circumci-
sion symbolized a covenant rather than a biologically inherited trait:
“physical yet not physiological, genealogical yet not genetic, circumci-
sion marks the Jews off as a distinct people without becoming a ‘racial’
indicator in the modern sense.”63 In assiduously avoiding the question
of whether Othello is circumcised or not, the play in effect substitutes
a mark of inherited (racial) difference for a mark that is inscribed onto
the body (which could conceivably be inscribed onto any male body).
Othello’s reliance on skin color to mark his alterity is significant,
I argue, not only because it privileges a spectacle of difference that
is indisputable, but because it forces a consideration of whether a
difference conceived as natural and inherited can be rendered indif-
ferent by Christian faith. The fact of Othello’s blackness also opens
the possibility that his original faith (prior to his baptism) was not
merely inscribed onto his body but bred into it. Of course, blackness
in the period was not understood exclusively in terms of a heritable
condition, but was also understood to be produced by environmental
influences such as the sun or diet (acted upon the body, somewhat
like circumcision). In this sense, the production of blackness was
analogous to the stage’s use of prosthetics or makeup to conceal or
darken an actor’s white skin. At the same time, competing discourses
of blackness – such as those implicit in Iago’s invocation of a “black
ram . . . tupping . . . [a] white ewe” – understood it to be indelible,
innate, and tied to sexual reproduction. As Jonathan Burton puts it, “In
Othello Shakespeare stages an early modern contest of contemporane-
ous notions of race.”64 Bound up with these competing understandings
of how blackness was embodied was the distinction between Muslims
and pagans and their varying susceptibility to conversion. Thus, the
question of whether a black body could be converted to the Christian
faith seems to return to the distinction between the more threaten-
ing, and hence unconvertible, Muslim and the more easily converted
pagan. However, if the religious difference between Muslims and
pagans directly impinged upon the ontological significance of black-
ness, these differences also collapsed under the sign of blackness – a
contradiction that Othello’s ambiguous origins neatly illustrate.
Richard Eden provides an example of how blackness elides Muslim/
pagan differences (even as it is called into service to distinguish them)
in the preface to his English translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s
The Decades of the Newe Worlde (1555). Seeking to encourage colo-
nization and conversion in the New World, Eden attempts to link the
dark skin of pagans to their relative susceptibility to Christian conver-
sion. Of course, it is important to realize that the conclusions Eden
draws for New World pagans do not necessarily apply to African
pagans, though the very use of the same term (“pagan”) to denote the
religions of these two groups reflects their status as western construc-
tions that presume their equivalence. What I hope to show through the
example of Eden’s preface, and more broadly through Othello, is how
these kinds of cultural constructions (of both pagans and Muslims) call
into service certain logics of skin color that render blackness simultane-
ously conditional and unconditional, environmentally produced and
innate, susceptible to Christian faith and resistant to conversion.
Specifically, Eden reconfigures the potential obstacle of the dark skin
of the New World natives by drawing an analogy between the effects
of the sun and the conversion of a pagan soul to Christianity. In doing
so, he inverts the trope of the Ethiopian eunuch by suggesting that the
goal of conversion is not whitewashing the subject but writing upon or
“coloring” him. He proposes that just as contact with the sun trans-
forms skin color, contact with Christian “conversation” will induce
conversion:
For lyke as they that goo much in the soonne, are coloured therewith
although they go not for that purpose, So may the conversation of the
Christians with the gentyles induce theym to owre religion, where there
is no greater cause of contrarye to resyste as in the Turkes who are alredy
drowned in theyr confirmed erroure. But these simple gentiles lyving only
after the lawe of nature, may well bee likened to a smoothe and bare table
unpainted, or a white paper unwritten, upon the which yow may at first
paynte or wryte what yow lyste, as yow can not upon tables alredy paynted,
unleese yow rase or blot owt the fyrste formes.65
After positing that the pagans’ susceptibility to the sun provides evi-
dence that they are like a “bare table unpainted, or a white paper
unwritten,” Eden draws an explicit contrast with Muslim “Turkes,”
who are like “tables alredy paynted,” and cannot be converted “unleese
yow rase or blot owt the fyrste formes.” However, if he appears to make
a distinction between pagans’ susceptibility to the sun and Muslims as
“tables alredy paynted,” he employs the same metaphor of darkening,
or “paynting,” to describe both. In effect, the logics of convertibility and
inconvertibility rely on the same evidence of blackness. And in the cases
of both pagans and Muslims, Eden’s reasoning reveals an uneasy slip-
page between the state of the skin and that of the soul. Ultimately, his
effort to differentiate pagans from “Turkes” who are “alredy paynted”
belies an underlying recognition that Muslims and Native Americans
could both be externally marked by dark skin. Othello’s connections
to multiple discursive histories and geographies demonstrate how easily
a range of religious and national differences could be collapsed under
the sign of blackness. Moreover, this duality, by which dark skin could
signify both as an openness to being written upon and as ineligibility
for conversion, reveals how environmental and innate explanations for
blackness were bound up together.
Skin color was not the only receptacle for anxieties about religious
conversion, but it certainly was a powerful one with relevance for
pagans and Muslims alike. Of course, it is important to acknowledge
that not all Muslims were understood to possess dark skin, and in fact
there is ample evidence that most were not, though the question of to
what degree the stage represented Muslims as dark skinned remains
impossible to answer. Was a light-skinned Muslim understood to be
more easily converted to Christianity than a dark-skinned one? Perhaps
just as revealing as cultural productions that presume the innate resist-
ance of Muslims to Christian conversion are the few that deem it
possible. Meredith Hanmer’s sermon delivered on the occasion of the
baptism of a Turk in London in 1586 offers an illuminating contrast to
Eden’s preface. The site of the baptism in the Hospital of St. Katherine,
located on the northern bank of the Thames River, seems to highlight
London’s exposure to foreign penetration. However, the title page to
the sermon specifies that the Turk in question, “one Chinano,” was
“borne at Nigropontus,” an island bordering Greece.66 Thus, it is
likely the convert was not distinguished by dark skin. The fact that
skin color is not mentioned anywhere in the sermon removes its con-
sideration altogether from the question of convertibility. Further, as
Nabil Matar suggests, Hanmer’s specification of Chinano’s birthplace
drew attention to a city that had been lost to the Muslims in 1470,
and that Protestants might now reclaim “through the power of their
faith.”67 John Foxe refers to “Euboea, or Nigropontus” in his Actes
and Monuments as an island “bordering about Grecia” that had been
“wonne likewise by the Turke, from the Christians.”68 Thus, in a sense,
Hanmer posits not the conversion of a Muslim to Christianity, but
the long overdue reconversion of a subject whose native and natural
religion was Christianity. Hanmer clearly acknowledges the disparity
between Islam, “in greatnes halfe the world,” and Christianity, “now
couched in the North partes of the world, and so far that it seemeth
. . . all frozen.”69 But he makes a plea to reverse this trend by returning
God’s “lost and wandering sheepe” to the “sheepefold.”70 He con-
cludes with a prayer to “open the eyes of all Infidels, Iewes, Turkes,
and Saracens, bring into the folde all lost and wandering sheepe, make
all nations one sheepefolde, vnder the head Shepheard and Bishoppe
of our soules.”71 In conceiving of the conversion of Jews, Turks, and
Saracens as a continuation of the “Gospell,” and expressing a desire
to “make all nations one sheepefolde,” Hanmer justifies the baptism
he is about to perform with the rhetoric of universal fellowship. Part
of what enables this conversion, I want to suggest, is the fact that the
convert’s home was formerly a Christian land, as well as the subject’s
disassociation from a discourse of skin color.
Predestination and the Terms of Salvation
Although in the years leading up to Othello’s production in 1604,

Protestant conversions of Muslims and pagans were fairly uncommon,
the implication that a universal Christianity could encompass all souls
had become a source of controversy in English ecclesiological circles. In
1596 Archbishop John Whitgift responded to pressures to revise the
language of Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church
of England so as to more explicitly elucidate the terms of double pre-
destination. Whereas Article XVII implied that all Christians were
potentially eligible for salvation, the Lambeth Articles insist that “God
from eternity has predestined some men to life, and reprobated some
to death,” that these numbers “cannot be increased or diminished,”
and that “it is not in the will or the power of each and every man to be
saved.”72 Furthermore, according to these terms, “those not predestined
to salvation” would be “inevitably condemned on account of their sins,”
whereas true faith could never be lost “totally or finally in the elect.”73
I want to suggest that debates surrounding the terms of predestina-
tion were partly informed by questions of conversion raised by intercul-
tural contact with non-Christian others, and that at times Protestants
attempted to use the logic of predestination to justify exclusion by nar-
rowing the constrictions of universal faith. The debates were compli-
cated, but in one basic sense, the participants disagreed over whether all
humans had the capacity to be saved, or whether some were irretriev-
ably predestined to hell. This question directly involved a consideration
of non-Christian souls that, perhaps through no fault of their own,
were excluded from salvation. In 1596 – the same year that Whitgift
devised the Lambeth Articles – Thomas Goad used the example of
Turks to illustrate the limits of Protestant grace:
quoniam extra ecclesiam Turcae et aliae nationes barbarae quamplurimae,
licet habeant externa dona hujus vitae communia a Deo concessa, tamen
gratia ad salutem sufficiente omnino destituuntur.74
Since the Turks and other foreign peoples are outside of the church, they
may receive the superficial gifts commonly granted by God to all humanity,
but they nevertheless lack the grace necessary for salvation.
According to Goad, to argue that grace was available to Turks was

intolerable. Others, like Richard Hooker, were more inclined to allow
that all human beings might be saved. In January of 1604, the same
year that Othello was first performed, the Hampton Court Conference
brought the predestination debates into the public eye. At the confer-
ence, King James refused to endorse a more explicit articulation of pre-
destination than that previously outlined in the Thirty-Nine Articles. In
other words, the conference resulted in a minor victory for people like
Hooker through its refusal to explicitly narrow the terms of eligibility
for redemption. Nonetheless, the surrounding debate constituted clear
evidence of the beginnings of a controversy that would resurface with
significant consequences in the 1620s. In both the early 1600s and the
1620s, these ecclesiastical controversies were, I suggest, influenced by
considerations of conversion introduced by transcultural commerce
and conflict.
As Othello makes clear, England’s growing awareness of and reli-
ance on intercultural contact with non-Christian others also informed
popular considerations of who was eligible for salvation and who was
inevitably damned. In addition, Othello negotiated these considera-
tions by drawing playfully upon contemporary ecclesiastical debates. In
presupposing the legitimacy of Othello’s baptism and then calling
his eligibility for redemption into question by depicting his ultimate
damnation, the play engages the topical rhetoric of the predestination
debates.75 While I would resist reading Othello as a strict allegory
of contemporary religious debates, I suggest that the play references
debates about predestination as part of its broader exploration of the
relationship between physical embodiment and spiritual faith. On the
one hand, Shakespeare’s representation of a baptized Moor constitutes
a powerful testimony to Pauline universalism and its ability to transcend
outward difference. On the other hand, the possibility of Othello’s inclu-
sion among the Christian elect and the social transgressions it affords
him do not go unquestioned in the play, and he is ultimately consigned
to a fate of suicide and eternal damnation. That the spiritual sacraments
of Othello’s baptism and marriage to Desdemona effect an offensive
inversion of social and cultural hierarchies is reflected in Brabantio’s
objection to the marriage: “For if such actions may have passage free, /
Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (1.2.98–9).
A brief exchange between Cassio and Iago exemplifies how the logic
of predestination could be used to challenge universal Pauline grace
and narrow the terms of eligibility for salvation. Soon after landing in
Cyprus under Othello’s command, Cassio draws attention to the pos-
sible confusion between social hierarchies on earth and God’s determi-
nation of who is elect and who is damned. Spurred on by the effects of
alcohol, he conflates the two systems of authority:
Cassio: . . . Well, God’s above all, and there be souls must be saved, and
there be souls must not be saved.
Iago: It’s true good lieutenant.
Cassio: For mine own part – no offense to the general, nor any man of
quality – I hope to be saved.
Iago: And so do I too, lieutenant.
Cassio: Ay, but, by your leave, not before me. The lieutenant is to be saved
before the ancient. (2.3.98–106)
Clearly, we are meant to be laughing at Cassio’s drunken reasoning,
which oversimplifies the doctrine of predestination and confuses it
with the military ranking of lieutenant over ancient. But his difficulty
in making sense of things also points up the more serious irony of the
fact that a black Moor occupies the highest rank of general, and would
by Cassio’s logic be the first person to get a place in heaven. In drawing
attention to the relationship between social hierarchies and those
authorized by divine will, Cassio raises questions about Othello’s elec-
tion. Cassio’s confusion of social hierarchy with divine will betokens
the play’s larger ambivalence and discomfort about Othello’s status as
a Christian. While in one sense, it lines up with Iago’s sinful percep-
tion that his own relegation to ensign matters more than the eternal
destiny of his soul, in another sense, it accords with the resolution of
the play, which reveals through Othello’s damnation that he could not
have been among the elect. In the end, the play realigns social author-
ity with divine authority when, as per Lodovico’s order, Othello’s
“power and command is taken off” and officially transferred to Cassio
(5.2.329). By ultimately aligning black skin with damnation, the play
rectifies the social inversions enabled by Pauline universalism.
Faith and Female Chastity
Importantly, Othello does not attribute the Moor’s exclusion from

grace directly to his visible difference, but rather to his ultimate lack of
faith in Desdemona’s fidelity. Thus, Othello’s damnation proceeds from
his own inability to sustain faith in something invisible and improb-
able – his wife’s chastity. What Othello cannot get past is the possibil-
ity that Desdemona can “turn, and turn” (4.1.253) and still remain in
outward appearance as white as “snow” (5.2.4). It is not only fitting
but instructive that the leap of faith that Desdemona makes, and that
Othello cannot make, is measured through an index of chastity, an
entity that is fundamentally intangible and beyond assurance, and yet
rife with embodied implications. Ironically, it is Othello’s own reliance
on tangible evidence, or “ocular proof,” that seems to reinvest outward
appearances with meaning. Though his first instinct is to reject Iago’s
insinuations that Desdemona has been unfaithful, Othello insists that
the dispensation of his mind shall be staked upon visual proof. Thus, he
adopts a position that, while appealing to common sense, contradicts
the spiritual basis of faith, which eludes all assurances. His desire for
proof, in turn, leads him to accept the handkerchief as a physical mani-
festation of Desdemona’s chastity. In contrast, Desdemona persists in
loving Othello even after he has visibly shown her reason to withdraw
her love. After being physically struck by Othello and called a “whore,”
Desdemona “kneels” before him and reiterates her unwavering devo-
tion: “Unkindness may do much, / And his unkindness may defeat my
life, / But never taint my love” (4.2.161–3). Whereas Othello’s faith
in Desdemona’s love is contingent upon visual proof, her love persists
despite the outward evidence of his “unkindness” and demonstrates a
faith in him that eludes visual corollary.
Given that the play embraces Desdemona’s way of seeing things,
Othello is damned not directly because of his outer blackness but
because of his inability to sustain faith in Desdemona’s intangible faith,
or, in other words, for his reliance on outward markers that would in
fact attach significance to his own blackness. Ostensibly, the play disa-
vows the value of such outward signs by unabashedly featuring Othello
as the object of Desdemona’s love and investing in him the very welfare
of the Christian state. Othello himself dismisses his own speculation
that his blackness or his old age could account for Desdemona’s infidel-
ity, scoffing, “yet that’s not much” (3.3.270). In addition, the play more
generally refutes the authority of outward appearances by emphasizing
Iago’s deceptive manipulation of the circumstantial evidence that per-
suades Othello of Desdemona’s guilt. In exposing Othello’s misguided
demand for proof of something that even Iago acknowledges “cannot
be seen,” the play insists that the only assurance of faith is faith itself. In
effect, it punishes those who would require assurance that a black
Moor could become Christian, by asserting that such a need is itself evi-
dence of a lack of faith in faith. And yet, the play simultaneously banks
on the power of inference to persuade an audience. Othello’s private
speculation, “haply for I am black,” hangs in the air, and, by virtue of
the ever-present reminder of his black body, is finally as insuppressible
as the materiality of the spotted handkerchief that circulates too freely
from place to place (3.3.267).
If the play ultimately elides outward blackness with a lack of faith
that renders one too susceptible to visual signs, it gradually imbues
female Christian chastity with an unshakable constancy. Iago’s deter-
mination to “undo [Desdemona’s] credit with the Moor,” and “turn
her virtue into pitch,” conflates the process of conversion or exchange
with blackening, but in effect what happens is just the opposite:
Desdemona’s virtue is progressively whitened by the unjust attack
(2.3.354–5). Quite simply, the “tragedy” of Desdemona’s death hinges
directly on the inconvertibility of her chastity. Othello’s mistaken
charge that Desdemona “can turn and turn, and yet go on / And turn
again” invokes the common trope of female sexuality as commodity,
but its very inapplicability to Desdemona exposes the unstable and
ironic status of her accuser, a Moor with a pronounced history of
conversion (4.1.253–4). Hyper-aware of the susceptibility of female
sexuality to an economy of exchange, the play holds in tension an
implied parallel between female sexual turning and Othello’s convert-
ibility, but staunchly resists an equation of the two. If “Moor” is the
sign of convertibility in Othello, female sexuality is the sign of Christian
resistance.
As the following chapters in this book reveal, other early modern plays
set in cross-cultural, contested territories of the eastern Mediterranean
offer a broader context for reading the significance of Desdemona’s
chastity. Patterns of gendered resistance in these plays also suggest
possibilities for interpreting Desdemona’s persecution and murder
as triumphant rather than tragic. For example, in the next chapter I
demonstrate how the Catholic template of the virgin martyr offered
an empowering model of Christian resistance to Islamic persecution
because of the way her death through martyrdom constituted resist-
ance rather than capitulation. The virgin martyr’s death also under-
scored her inviolable chastity by providing eternal assurance of her
sexual virtue. Although Desdemona’s virtue is tied to her married
chastity and not to virginity, her partial resonance with this model
of resistance may suggest a new way to interpret what many have
read as a passive acceptance of her tragic fate. Attracting scorn from
feminist critics for her apparent lack of resistance to Othello’s abuse
in the second half of the play, Desdemona even accepts blame for her
own death. In response to Emilia’s question of who has killed her, she
replies, “Nobody. I myself” (5.2.122). And yet, this somewhat baffling
statement of complicity could suggest her willing preference for death
over the blackening of her name and her awareness of what it meant
to willfully maintain her faith in the face of such persecution. Though
Desdemona denounces the unjustness of Cassio’s death – “O, falsely,
falsely murdered!” (5.2.115) – her stoic acceptance of her own death
– “Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell! (5.2.123)” – suggests a
willful act of martyrdom.
Ironically, Desdemona’s dead body ensures the triumph of her
chastity by lending her faith and innocence a kind of material
weight. Othello ensures the integrity of her corpse by vowing, “I’ll not
shed her blood / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And
smooth as monumental alabaster” (5.2.3–5). Just as death ensures the
virgin martyr’s eternal purity, the permanent fixing of Desdemona’s
body in “monumental alabaster” seals her innocence in stone.76 Thus,
the distinction between the faithful and the faithless is ultimately given
assurance in Othello through the tangible spectacle of Desdemona’s
dead body. Moreover, by offering a material index of female chastity
that is otherwise immaterial and imperceptible, Desdemona’s flesh
– “whiter . . . than snow,” “smooth as monumental alabaster,” and
forever “cold, cold” – assumes a certain racial distinction in relation
to Othello’s outer blackness, even though, in privileging Desdemona’s
inner vision, the play ostensibly wants to disavow such a distinc-
tion.77 The physical evidence of Othello’s inherent damnation emerges
in direct, mutual opposition to that of Desdemona’s inherent chastity:
the whiter and more chaste Desdemona is, the blacker and more damned
Othello becomes, and vice versa. Thus, it is by inadvertently rendering
both blackness and female chastity visible in opposition to one another
that Othello pushes faith into a material register, and demonstrates its
misgivings about universal Christian fellowship.
Cyprus, the Miracle of Gentile Conversion, and Othello’s

Damnation
Given Othello’s setting in Cyprus, an Ottoman territory that had histor-

ically changed hands between Christians and Muslims multiple times,
Desdemona’s chastity assumes a particular vulnerability that affiliates
her with other dramatic heroines whose chastity was under attack
in places like Rhodes, Malta, and Tunis.78 Moreover, Desdemona’s
persecution and murder by a Moor take on particular significance in
relation to the play’s contested setting. As Vitkus observes, Othello
loosely adapts the story of the Sultan and the Fair Greek, in which the
Ottoman siege of Constantinople is followed by the sultan’s murder of
a fair Christian captive who establishes too threatening a hold over his
heart.79 The wide range of iterations of this story that appeared in print
and on the stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
establish a clear pattern of linking military imperialism and interracial
sexual violence.80 Like Constantinople, Cyprus was a Christian strong-
hold and its fall to the Turks was perceived to have devastating symbolic
consequences. Cyprus had been under Venetian rule since 1473, but in
1571 Selimus II recaptured the island for the Turks.81 Venice signed a
peace treaty with the Turks in 1573 in which they formally relinquished
Cyprus. Despite the fact that Cyprus remained under Ottoman domin-
ion during the time of Othello’s initial performance, the play represents
it as a Venetian territory. This may reflect a bald fantasy, or, as Horace
Howard Furness suggested in his New Variorum edition, it may set the
action of the play sometime between Venice’s conquest of the island
in 1473 and the Turks’ recapture of it in 1571.82 Another possibility,
suggested by Emrys Jones, is that the play transposes to Cyrus the 1570
Christian naval victory at Lepanto, which King James commemorated
in his heroic poem Lepanto (1591).83 Regardless of what Shakespeare
had in mind in terms of the temporal setting for Othello, however, he
clearly departs from all historical accounts in his depiction of the Turks
drowning on their way to Cyprus and thus losing the war by default. In
effect, the Moor’s murder of his Christian wife takes the place of the
military battle between Christians and Muslims. Similarly, Shakespeare
departs from historical sources in his appointment of a Moor as the
leader of the Christian forces in Cyprus, even though it was common for
Moorish mercenaries to fight in Christian armies. The poignant irony of
Othello’s spearheading of the Christian resistance against Islam is cer-
tainly enhanced by the possibility of his Muslim or Turkish origins and
lends weight to the arguments of Lupton and Vitkus. His position as
the Christian general maximizes the stakes of the play’s anxious invest-
ment in Pauline universalism – holding the possibility that Othello is a
sincere and trustworthy convert in tension with the alternative possibil-
ity that he is an illegitimate impostor who has dangerously infiltrated
the Christian ranks.
For the English, Cyprus was of interest not just because of its sym-
bolic imperial and religious significance but because of its valuable
trade. The busy port at Famagusta constituted a rich market and a con-
venient resting place for ships sailing east on commercial missions or
other journeys. Europeans continued to export coveted Cyprian goods
even after the island had been repossessed by the Turks. The 1589
edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Nauigations lists “sumack,” “sebesten,”
and “coloquintida” among the desirable commodities imported from
Cyprus.84 Hakluyt also provides a “list of Christian slaves in the taking
of Famagusta,” referencing the captives taken by the Turks during
the invasion of 1570.85 As with Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors,
Cyprus’s multiple signification as a site of East-West trade and a site
of Ottoman imperial conquest produced a disturbing analogy between
exchangeable commodities and convertible souls.
What is more, Cyprus resembled Ephesus through its particular asso-
ciation in the New Testament with Pauline conversion – an association
that distinctly illuminates both the miracle of Othello’s Christian con-
version and the failure of inner sight that prompts his damnation. It was
in Cyprus that St. Paul performed his first prominent conversion of a
Gentile. As detailed in Acts 13.5–12, Paul visited Cyprus with Barnabas
and John when a Roman proconsul called upon them to “heare the
worde of God” (13.7). Paul proceeded to teach the proconsul about
Jesus, when a “Jewish sorcerer” named Elymas intervened and tried to
“turne away the Deputie from the faith” (13.8). Paul then blinded the
sorcerer, and, in turn, the Gentile proconsul was persuaded to convert
to Christianity. Thus, the impossibility of the Jewish sorcerer’s conver-
sion was set against the miracle of Gentile conversion. It was at this
moment (13.9) that Paul, heretofore referred to as Saul, began to be
called Paul. St. Paul’s momentous conversion of the Gentile procon-
sul, who, in being made to see the blindness of the Jewish sorcerer, is
himself brought into the light, resonates powerfully with Shakespeare’s
representation of a tragic protagonist whose demand for ocular proof
belies an inner blindness. The resonance between Othello and the
Jewish sorcerer is further reinforced through Brabantio’s charges
of witchcraft (1.3.105–7), as well as by Othello’s own association
of himself with a handkerchief given to his mother by an Egyptian
charmer (3.4.58–9, 72). What Shakespeare exposes through Othello’s
damnation is the impossible conversion that both undoes and sustains
Pauline universalism.
Othello’s potential connection to witchcraft and to the Jewish sor-
cerer in Acts 13 may, as Burton argues, constitute a “sign of his irrev-
ocable non-Christian origins,” but in other ways this connection may
represent a racist judgment by Brabantio, and an internalized racism
by Othello, that the play does not necessarily endorse.86 The difficulty
of settling this question points to a larger ambivalence in the play
about whether Othello’s mortal sin and ultimate damnation result
from his victimization by Iago or whether they confirm his identity
as an irredeemable infidel. Upon recognizing his error, Othello states
that a “demi-devil” has “ensnared [his] soul and body,” but is Iago
responsible for Othello’s damnation or does he merely help to expose
Othello’s inherent incapacity for Christian faith (5.2.298–9)? On the
one hand, Othello undergoes a conversion (or reconversion) at the
hands of Iago, but on the other hand, for English Protestants who
accepted predestination, Othello’s damnation would have had to
have been predetermined, and thus could have only confirmed his
unalterable status as an irredeemable infidel. Just as the play equivo-
cates about Othello’s capacity for Christian conversion, it is unclear
about whether its critique of ocular proof is aimed at Othello or at
the logic that consigns him to damnation. Leading up to its tragic
conclusion, the play seems caught between endorsing the universal
sway of Pauline faith and insisting upon a narrower understanding
of faith.
Just before committing suicide, Othello offers as clear an insight
as any in describing his own understanding of his fall and exclusion
from grace. His allusion to his identity as divided between “Venetian”
Christian and “turbanned Turk” (5.2.351–2) offers an analogy to the
opposition between the converted Gentile proconsul and the incon-
vertible Jewish sorcerer of Acts 13. It is not so much the specificity of
“Christian” and “Turk,” “Gentile” and “Jew,” that I am interested in
here as the way that these terms function as figures of Pauline faith and
its limits – the simultaneity of miraculous conversion and certain dam-
nation. Leading up to this moment, Othello instructs Lodovico in how
to relate his “unlucky deeds”:
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
...
of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe (5.2.340–6)
Critics have noted the difference between the quarto and folio versions
of the play, where “Indian” is replaced by “Iudian,” and speculated
upon the significance of this distinction.87 By contrast, I am interested
in the act performed by this figure – what it means for Othello to
compare himself to one who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his
tribe.” The act seems to describe both Othello’s murder of Desdemona
and his rejection of Christian faith. Indeed, Emilia relates Othello’s
unworthiness of heaven to his unworthiness of Desdemona when
she chastises Othello, “This deed of thine is no more worthy heaven
/ Than thou wast worthy her” (5.2.157–8). The pearl thus connotes
Desdemona’s innocence and virtue and also alludes to the purity and
perfection of heaven symbolized by the “pearl of great price.” In the
Gospel of Matthew, the kingdom of heaven is compared “to a mer-
chant man, that seketh good perles, Who hauing founde a perle of great
price, went and solde all he had, and boght it” (13.45–6). Earlier in his
gospel, Matthew addresses the question of proper and improper recipi-
ents of Christian faith. He instructs Christ’s disciples, “Giue ye not that
which is holie, to dogges, nether cast ye your pearles before swine, lest
they treade them vnder their feete, and turning againe, all to rent you”
(7.6). In light of this precedent, Othello’s reference to throwing away
the “pearl,” as well as his identification with the “circumcised dog,”
suggest that he recognizes himself to be an inappropriate recipient of
the gospel. Whether because of his susceptibility to reconversion or
because of the underlying failure of his initial conversion, Othello is
excluded from Christian salvation. By virtue of his inability to sustain
the faith of his baptism, Othello marks the bodily limits of Christian
universalism.
Conclusion: The Unconverted Remainder
Shakespeare’s plays reveal the impracticalities of living out univer-

sal fellowship in contemporary contexts of religious and economic
rivalry, but I would resist concluding too simply that Shakespeare fails
Paul. Rather, Shakespeare may be said to represent in terms specific to
his own culture an ambivalence inherent in Paul about the persistence
and significance of physical stigmata, whether innate or assumed, and
of unconverted remainders more generally. As Lupton suggests, “While
the general move of the epistles is to dissolve Israel’s covenantal bonds,
they nonetheless find a new place in giving linguistic and social groups
coherence within a larger scheme.”88 According to this view, while
Paul dismisses the theological significance of the law, he sanctions its
ethnic or political function: circumcision is no longer a sign of elec-
tion, but remains as a sign of Jewishness. Critics such as Lupton have
brought into sharper view the persistence of local systems of difference
under Paul’s theological universalism by emphasizing messianic conti-
nuities and challenging the exegetical closure of Christian typology. As
Kneidel puts it, “The rhetorical occasion of Paul’s epistles was not one
of radical or triumphal transformation but of anticipatory or interim
struggle.”89 In drawing attention to the ways that Pauline universalism
undergoes a new struggle in post-Reformation England, Shakespeare
perhaps calls us to the deeper claims of Pauline universalism. He offers
a vision of Christian universalism in which physical badges persist and
continue to hold sway for specific communities and epochs, and in
which the exclusionary significance of these badges continually butts
up against the theological tenet of universalism. More particularly, he
instills with meaning the specific badge of blackness, a badge that is
ambiguously innate and assumed, occupying a fuzzy ground between
biological inheritance and environmental effect. If universalism’s reach
is exemplified by its transgression of the limit of what remains possible
– a boundary that it continues to renegotiate by reaching toward the
next level of impossibility – Othello locates that limit in the body of
the black Moor. In effect, Shakespeare shows us how the historically
contingent impossibility that threatens Pauline universalism in his own
time was an embodied distinction caught in the process of becoming
racialized.
In exposing this unconverted remainder produced by Christian
universalism in early modern England, Shakespeare represents Paul’s
working out of the relationship between universal faith and physical
stigmata in a state of incompletion. Critics have characterized Paul’s
unfinished business and its subsequent manifestations in different
ways. Borrowing from Slavoj Žižek, Kneidel usefully suggests that
Renaissance writers reveal a “struggling universalism.”90 By contrast,
Lupton understands universalism’s embrace of Jews and Gentiles as
a “death into citizenship,” forcing a relinquishment of individual
particularity.91 Agamben considers Paul’s messianic implications in
terms of time, characterizing messianic time as a period of deferral
“between” Jewish and Christian time, the resurrection and the second
coming.92 By contrast, Badiou interprets Pauline universalism as a
radical “rupture.”93 In my reading of Shakespeare, universal fellow-
ship represents an impossible ideal – impossible not only because it
cannot live in the real world but also because its miraculous potential is
evidenced by its very impossibility. What Shakespeare urges us to per-
ceive anew in Paul’s theological design is the impossibility of Christian
universalism that underlies its possibility. Desdemona’s faith in Othello
means something precisely because it defies all probability and because
of the fact that Othello inevitably forsakes her.
Moreover, Shakespeare exposes Pauline universalism as a system
that, like global capitalism, not only conceals its exclusion of others
but depends upon these exclusions. In effect, he forces us to apprehend
the Jewish sorcerer whose damnation guides the Gentile proconsul into
the light, the Turk whose demise brings the Christian into being, the
faithless husband whose doubt reveals his wife’s undying faith. But
in drawing attention to the dialectical relationship between exclusion
and universalism, Shakespeare also forces an awareness of the specific
historical contexts that animate this relationship. Thus, his revisiting
of Paul around the start of the seventeenth century not only illumi-
nates certain struggles inherent in Paul’s theology but shows us how
these illuminations are fostered by Shakespeare’s particular time and
place. Amidst the cross-currents of post-Reformation controversies
and emerging global trade, the Christianized Moor tests the limits of
Pauline universalism. But if Shakespeare’s Moor is trapped within
the struggling universalism of his time, his very struggle provides a
glimpse of potential triumph. In insisting upon the Moor’s damnation,
Shakespeare also produces a vision of what might be possible in a better
world: a black body whose “perfect soul / Shall manifest [him] rightly”
(1.2.31–2).
Chapter 2
Recycled Models: Catholic

Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance
to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr
and Other Red Bull Plays
I have such terrible fears of being impaled by a Turk.

WOMAN, Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake (1518)
As my discussions of The Comedy of Errors and Othello illustrate,

in the decades surrounding the start of the seventeenth century the
popular stage participated in testing the limits of Pauline universal-
ism. Shakespeare’s plays explore the implications of an understand-
ing of conversion that both eludes outward marking and overcomes
all previous physical and cultural distinctions. Responding to an
unstable contemporary religious climate in which commercial and
imperial developments also threatened conversions from Christianity,
Shakespeare falls back on bodily distinctions to anchor religious differ-
ences and to register conversion’s embodied effects. This chapter turns
to a slightly later time period – the 1620s – after England had estab-
lished a relatively stable trading presence in the Mediterranean and
the threat of conversion to Islam had become a popular theme on the
stage. I consider how several early modern plays by Thomas Dekker,
Philip Massinger, and Henry Shirley sought to grapple with this con-
temporary threat by revisiting ancient histories of Christian persecution
at the hands of pagans. In evoking correspondences between ancient
pagan and contemporary Turkish persecution, these plays demonstrate
how Catholic forms of martyrdom and miraculously preserved virginity
offered useful models for confronting the contemporary threat. In turn,
the particular models of resistance authorized by these plays tell us
something about how conversion to Islam was conceived in the popular
imagination as an embodied and sexual transformation.
Roughly around the same time that English playwrights were
popularizing the adventures of Christian renegades in contemporary
Mediterranean settings, the Red Bull Theatre presented a cluster of
martyr plays depicting threats of conversion in ancient Cappadocia,
Antioch, Babylon, and Carthage. Three plays in particular – Thomas
Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620), Henry
Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier (1619), and the anonymous Two Noble
Ladies and the Converted Conjurer (1622) – dramatize strategies of
Christian resistance to pagan persecution by championing examples of
martyrdom. These plays appear to resurrect the legacies and distinct
characteristics of Catholic martyrs, while at the same time resonating
with contemporary anxieties about Muslim persecution and forced
conversion. In this chapter I explore the temporal resonances evoked
by these plays, arguing that the reappearance of Catholic martyrs on
the English stage speaks to the particular embodied threats associ-
ated with conversion to Islam in contemporary Mediterranean con-
texts. Foregrounding The Virgin Martyr in particular, I explore the
cultural significance of a heroine who is not only a Catholic martyr but
a virgin martyr, linking her sexual vulnerability to the specific threats
of penetration and bodily contamination associated with conversion to
Islam.
While largely neglected by modern critics, Dekker and Massinger’s
1620 tragedy The Virgin Martyr enjoyed considerable popular success
in its time.1 According to the first quarto’s title page, it was “divers times
publickely Acted with great Applause, By the seruants of his Maiesties
Reuels” at the Red Bull Theatre, and underwent four printings in the
seventeenth century as well as a stage revival in 1660.2 What is striking
about the play’s popularity is its adaptation of a medieval virgin martyr
legend, a genre ostensibly suppressed by the English Reformation.
Following attempts in the 1570s by religious authorities to ban the
cycles of mystery plays in English towns and cities, most remnants of
hagiographical drama had disappeared from the stage.3 The record of a
fee of 40 shillings paid to the Master of the Revels on October 6, 1620,
for “new reforming” of the play may reflect its potentially controversial
content and offers a reminder of the formal scrutiny that forced London
playwrights to comply with official church doctrine.4
The small body of critics who have addressed the play over the
past fifty years either focus, like Louise Clubb (1964), on the striking
anomaly of its apparent Catholic content or else attempt, like Peter
Mullany (1970), Larry Champion (1984), and Jose M. Ruano de la
Haza (1991), to explain away this content by emphasizing the play’s
iconoclastic elements or arguing that its religious categories are mere
“pretext” for “a simple and clear struggle between good and evil.”5 But
despite these scattered attempts to raise or refute the question of The
Virgin Martyr’s Catholic affinities, the question remains largely unan-
swered: what accounts for the dramatic appeal in 1620 of a Catholic
Recycled Models 75
virgin martyr? Or more specifically, what is appealing at this time about
a martyr whose religious constancy is signified through her bodily
resistance to torture and, above all, through the preservation of her vir-
ginity? Leaving aside the obvious, though admittedly complex, expla-
nation of persisting Catholic sympathies in Protestant England, this
chapter accounts for the significance of The Virgin Martyr’s particular
representation of martyrdom by taking a broader, more global view of
the political and religious threats that surrounded its production.
I want to suggest that the appeal of virgin martyrdom and its empha-
sis upon physical inviolability can be better appreciated in light of
England’s increased commercial engagement with the Ottoman empire
during the early seventeenth century and the particular anxieties the
English stage began to attach to the threat of Islamic conversion. As I
discussed in the Introduction, the Ottoman empire’s commercial and
imperial dominance registered in threatening ways for the English during
a period when they began to rely increasingly on eastern Mediterranean
trade and to imagine themselves as a tiny player in an international
arena of commerce and power. Popular English discourses represented
the Turkish threat as a threat of conversion or of “turning Turk” – a
phenomenon that constituted both a genuine predicament for Christian
seamen who were captured by Turks and an imaginative theme or
trope on the London stage. The Virgin Martyr is roughly contemporary
with several plays that overtly thematize Christian resistance to turning
Turk, including Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610),
John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger’s The Knight of
Malta (c.1618), and Massinger’s The Renegado (c.1624). As detailed
through my analysis of A Christian Turned Turke in the Introduction,
the sexual act that facilitates conversion to Islam seals its tragic and
irreversible stakes. If in each of these plays conversion to Islam carries
this sexualized connotation, its resistance is modeled through the con-
stancy of a Christian virgin who remains chaste despite her relentless
pursuit by lustful Turks and the doubts of her Christian brothers. These
plays’ mediation of conversion through a register of sexuality reflects
a nexus of cultural and bodily transformation that was bound up with
the threat of turning Turk. In positing a direct relationship between
sexual intercourse and turning Turk, the Renaissance stage implied a
form of conversion that was manifested through the sexualized body
and that approximated a threat of reproductive contamination, or what
we now refer to as racial miscegenation.6
The stage’s overdetermination of sexual contact as the conduit for
Islamic conversion suggests a convergence of cultural and bodily, and
religious and proto-racial, differences that distinguished turning Turk
from other threats of religious conversion. In turn, dramatic depictions
of Christian-Muslim conflict indicated both the theater’s reliance on
prior templates for Christian resistance to religious persecution, and its
refiguring of these templates to address what was perceived to be a new,
embodied and sexualized threat. While The Virgin Martyr does not
overtly feature Turks or Islamic conversion, its particular representa-
tion of Christian resistance in the form of bodily inviolability assumes a
new currency in the face of the Ottoman threat, and reveals an implicit
correspondence between the medieval tradition of vowed virginity and
contemporary strategies for imagining resistance to turning Turk. In
effect, The Virgin Martyr’s idealization of its heroine’s physical, and
distinctly sexual, integrity recuperates and makes visible the medieval
Catholic models that inform contemporary dramatizations of resistance
to Islam.
By depicting the pagan persecution of Christians as an occasion-
ally transparent screen for Turkish persecution, The Virgin Martyr
effects a layering of different temporal moments. For example, Dekker
and Massinger’s choice of setting highlights a potential correspond-
ence between the persecution of early Christians in the Roman empire
and the contemporary persecution of Christians in the Ottoman
empire. Caesarea in Cappadocia, the site of Dorothea the heroine’s
martyrdom, lay in the heart of what was at the time of the play’s pro-
duction the territory of the Ottoman empire (central Turkey, north and
slightly east of Cyprus) (see Figure 2.1).7
Of the hundreds of saints’ tales that Dekker and Massinger could
have chosen to adapt, the majority are set not in the East but in Rome,
the imperial capital of the Roman empire.8 But if Christian persecution
in Cappadocia registers the more immediate threat of the Turk, it does
so not as a mere displacement but rather as a pointed reminder of a long
history of Christian resistance based on martyrdom. Just as John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs uses the larger context of church history to situate
sixteenth-century Protestant martyrdom, The Virgin Martyr appropri-
ates the history of early Christian persecution so as to construct a viable
model of resistance to the contemporary Turkish threat. In addition,
the play demonstrates through gender differences how this contempo-
rary model of resistance is both physically and culturally constituted, in
that female virginity also serves in the play as a model for the cultiva-
tion of voluntary male chastity and civility. After observing Dorothea’s
example, her pagan suitor Antoninus converts to Christianity and is
properly armed to resist the forces of pagan persecution in a Christian
manner. By contrasting Antoninus’s acquired Christian civility and self-
restraint with the ruthless and lustful manners of the pagans, the play
Recycled Models 77
Figure 2.1: A map from the Geneva Bible showing Cappadocia, which can
be located below the number 69 from the top of the map, under Galatia. “The
Description of the Contreis and Places Mencioned in the Actes of the Apostles,” from
The Bible and Holy Scriptures . . . [Geneva Bible] (London, 1560). Reproduced by
permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania
Libraries.
draws a distinction between Christian and pagan identity that I will

argue is directly relevant to contemporary English efforts to construct a
self-identity in opposition to the Turk.
The Legend of St. Dorothy
Dekker and Massinger’s popular play was based on the medieval

legend of St. Dorothy, which originated around the late seventh
century.9 Although Dorothy was believed to have suffered martyrdom
during the Diocletian persecutions on February 6, 304, her legend like
that of many other virgin martyrs of the third and early fourth centu-
ries did not emerge until the Middle Ages. By far the most significant
source of the legend’s dissemination was the Dominican friar Jacobus
de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, which appeared in more than 150 edi-
tions between 1470 and 1500. Dorothy’s legend was not included in
Jacobus’s original Legenda aurea, compiled between 1252 and 1260,
but was added by a later author or authors and extensively reproduced
in many vernacular renderings. As Karen Winstead has shown, the
virgin martyr legend was an enormously popular genre whose reader-
ship extended from clerics and anchoresses to lay provincial audiences
over the course of the Middle Ages.10 Dekker and Massinger likely
relied on a version of Dorothy’s story from one of three prominent
English translations available in the early modern period: Osbern
Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, written in 1447; William
Caxton’s The Golden Legend, published in 1483, 1503, and 1527; and
Alfonso Villegas’s popular Flos Sanctorvm (known in England as The
Lives of Saints), anonymously translated into English and printed at
Douai in 1609.11
Several defining details continue to be attached to Dorothy’s story
as it passed through the late Middle Ages. She is born and secretly
baptized in Caesarea, Cappadocia, after her parents flee from Rome
and the brutal persecution of Christians under the emperors Diocletian
and Maximian. As a young woman, her exceptional beauty inflames
the love of the prefect of Caesarea, but she staunchly refuses him and
publicly maintains that she is the bride of Christ. She spurns the pagan
gods and refuses to convert from Christianity. In return, she is repeat-
edly tortured by hot oil, starvation, iron hooks, beatings, and the mer-
ciless burning of her breasts. After emerging from all of these tortures
unharmed, Dorothy is sentenced to death by decapitation. Her two
sisters, now apostates from Christianity, are sent to plead with her, but
she instead reconverts them, and they are ruthlessly executed by the
prefect. On the way to her own execution, Dorothy’s unwavering faith
is mocked by a scribe named Theophilus, who asks her to send some
roses and apples from the garden of her spouse, Christ. Shortly after
Dorothy’s execution, Theophilus is visited by a fair, curly-haired child
dressed in a purple garment, from whom he receives the very basket of
roses and apples he had requested of Dorothy. Theophilus is immedi-
ately converted to Christianity and goes on to help convert most of the
city before he too is martyred under the pagan prefect.
Post-Reformation Context
As I have begun to suggest, Dekker and Massinger’s dramatic adap-

tation of this Catholic legend in post-Reformation England is itself
Recycled Models 79
a unique and remarkable development. Although hundreds of hagi-
ographical plays were performed on the Spanish stage between 1580
and 1680, The Virgin Martyr was quite possibly the last Catholic
saint’s play performed in England during this period. The play’s faith-
fulness to many elements of the medieval legend of St. Dorothy, includ-
ing her inviolable virginity, the manner of her torture and execution,
and the basket of fruit containing a cross of flowers that she sends to
Theophilus, indicate that the play is not wholly evacuated of its original
(Catholic) content. Its valorization of female virginity is all the more
striking given the strong cultural mandates against vowed celibacy in
Protestant England.12 Despite the cultural valuation of premarital chas-
tity in early modern England, lifelong celibacy (particularly against the
pressure to marry) carried negative associations with Catholic religious
orders. Of course, Queen Elizabeth’s virginity offered a prominent
exception, though even her exceptionalism was tainted by a degree of
popular controversy and doubt.
The more likely explanation for The Virgin Martyr’s popular success
is not a sudden, renewed interest in the forced conversion and martyr-
dom of early virgin saints, but the play’s resonance with contemporary
concerns about religious conversion in the same geographical terri-
tory.13 As Robert Brenner has argued, English commerce underwent
a shift in emphasis from cloth exports to luxury imports in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to a new and growing
demand for silks, spices, and currants obtained from Mediterranean
trade routes.14 While developments such as the collapse of the Antwerp
and Iberian entrepôts opened up English access to the eastern and
southern markets, English traders confronted numerous dangers and
uncertainties in the largely unpoliced waters of the Mediterranean
and its religiously and ethnically mixed trading ports, many of which
were under the control of the Ottoman empire. Multiple entries in the
Calendar of State Papers Domestic in James’s reign suggest that acts
of piracy committed by Turks and the related capture and conversion
of English seamen were of particular and grave concern to the British
government around the time of The Virgin Martyr’s performance.15 An
entry on May 15, 1622, describes a request made by “Merchants of
the several trading companies” in consideration of recent proposi-
tions made by Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to Turkey, for
the suppression of pirates: “Think the captives taken lately should be
redeemed by treaty, but owing to the decay of trade, it is impossible
to raise another contribution for suppressing pirates. Think the trade
may be better secured if the ships going southward sailed together in
fleets.”16 Numerous similar entries attest to the need to negotiate the
dual and often conflicting imperatives of maintaining access to the
southeastern markets and combating Turkish capture.
Conversion and the “Adventure Play”
As we have seen, the threat of conversion confronted by thou-

sands of English merchants and seamen in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries constituted a complexly imagined theme
on the Renaissance stage. In Turning Turk: English Theater and
the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, Daniel Vitkus analyzes
some of the ways that anxieties associated with England’s expand-
ing Mediterranean commerce informed theatrical representations of
Christian adventurers and their particular vulnerabilities to conver-
sion.17 These dramatic representations emerged, according to Jean
Howard, within the context of a new genre of “adventure plays” fea-
turing the travails of European pirates and privateers in southern and
eastern Mediterranean port cities like Tunis, Fez, and Antioch.18 Plays
such as The Famous History of Sir Thomas Stukeley (1596), The Fair
Maid of the West, Part I (c.1604), Fortune By Land and Sea (c.1609),
and A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610) celebrate the exploits of swash-
buckling renegade heroes, while also setting them in implicit opposition
to a recuperative model of gentility, distinguished not by wealth or title
but by English civility and self-control. While the renegade hero mani-
fested the excitement of English privateering and imperial fantasies, he
also evoked anxieties about cross-cultural commerce and the unsta-
ble identity of the English privateer. For example, as Barbara Fuchs
has argued, the renegade hero revealed the fuzzy distinction between
“categories of licit and illicit commerce” through his resemblance to
Turkish and Spanish pirates and his susceptibility to material and
bodily temptations that made him a prime candidate for conversion.19
Plays like John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s The
Travails of the Three English Brothers (c.1607) offer a corrective
alternative to the swashbuckling renegade by characterizing the Shirley
brothers as gentleman adventurers – perfect English models of moral
and physical restraint. The female protagonist of Heywood’s earlier
The Fair Maid of the West, Part I suggests a way in which the English
adventure hero might be cultivated according to a model of feminine
virtue and chastity.20 Thus, in various ways the early seventeenth-
century adventure drama forged a recuperative link between English
gentility and physical self-control that protected the adventuring hero
against moral deterioration and conversion. This link between cultural
Recycled Models 81
and bodily control prefigures the sexual terms through which conver-
sion is conceived in later dramas of the 1610s and 1620s, such as A
Christian Turned Turke and The Renegado, in which sexual and spir-
itual transgressions are explicitly conflated. Dekker and Massinger’s
The Virgin Martyr resonates with this evolving generic tradition, and
demonstrates through Dorothea’s spiritually and bodily constituted
chastity an empowering model of resistance to the contemporary
Ottoman threat.
While foregrounding an earlier history of religious persecution set
within the territory of the Roman empire, The Virgin Martyr exhibits
numerous trappings of the adventure play. Whereas, for example, the
Cappadocian geography of Dorothy’s legend is located inland from the
Mediterranean by about 150 miles and is completely landlocked, it is
represented in the play as an active port city. The Caesarean governor
invokes the vulnerability of port cities to invasion or escape when he
rallies his captain of the guards in anticipation of the Roman emperor
Diocletian’s visit: “Keepe the ports close, and let the guards be doubl’d,
/ Disarme the Christians, call it death in any / To weare a sword, or in
his house to haue one” (1.1.75–7). In this way, the play characterizes
Caesarea in ways that liken it to the Mediterranean port cities of Tunis
and Algiers, which dominated the adventure drama and functioned as
centers of intercultural trade between Christians and Turks (as well as
Jews and Moors). These port cities along the Barbary coast were liminal
and unstable places where Christian capture and enslavement were
always possibilities. As discussed in the Introduction, the plight of early
modern Christians captured by Turks became known to the English
not only through popular drama but also through news pamphlets and
travel narratives, as well as through prayers and collections directed
toward the rescue of enslaved Christians.21
In The Virgin Martyr, the presence of a slave from Brittaine
– summoned by his pagan captors to rape Dorothea – resonates
with the contemporary captivity of British subjects in the Ottoman
empire, while simultaneously recalling Britain’s past colonization by
ancient Rome. The chief pagan persecutor’s subsequent instructions to
release the Christian prisoners invoke the “trauaile” associated with
Mediterranean travel and captivity:
Haste then to the port,

You shall there finde two tall ships ready rig’d,
In which embarke the poore distressed soules
And beare them from the reach of tyranny,
Enquire not whither you are bound, the deitie
That they adore will giue you prosperous winds,
And make your voyage such, and largely pay for
Your hazard, and your trauaile. (5.2.74–81)
Theophilus’s direct reference to “the port” and “two tall ships” again
suggests Caesarea’s conflation with the port cities popularized through
the adventure drama. The Christian prisoners’ escape from “the reach
of tyranny” also invokes the contemporary plight of Christian cap-
tives enslaved by the tyrannical Turk. And Theophilus’s reference to
“hazard” and “trauaile” in the last line employs terminology com-
monly used to describe the danger and toil associated with sailing along
the Barbary coast. The early modern interchangeability of “trauaile”
(carrying the sense of “toil or labor”) and “travel” (referring to “jour-
neying or a journey”) reflects the personal dangers that early modern
English seamen confronted in the unpoliced, intercultural spaces of the
Mediterranean.
At times, The Virgin Martyr’s subtle conflations of pagan conver-
sion and the contemporary threat of turning Turk virtually efface the
ancient context. For example, Hircius and Spungius, Dorothea’s two
disloyal servants, bear a striking resemblance to the clownish renegades
of the adventure drama who display a propensity for turning moti-
vated not by faith or persecution, but by carnal appetites and material
greed. While obedience to parents and the law are offered as the chief
motivations for pagan conversion in the tradition of the virgin martyr
legend, carnal temptations and material incentives prompt the conver-
sion of early modern renegades in the adventure drama. Hircius and
Spungius, who are not present in any of the play’s medieval sources,
invert the notion of a spiritually and bodily constituted chastity, in that
they are spiritually and bodily debased. Their physical lust and lack of
restraint is advertised through their very names: Hircius is a “whore-
master” and Spungius a “drunkard.” Spungius reveals his shallow alle-
giances when he says, “I am resolued to haue an Infidels heart, though
in shew I carry a Christians face” (2.1.47–8). This disjunction between
inner faith and outer show reappears as a persistent theme and source
of anxiety in plays about Christians turning Turk.
We encounter another temporal slippage in The Virgin Martyr’s fre-
quent allusions to circumcision and castration in relation to conversion
– an association absent in medieval narratives of pagan conversion,
but often played to comic effect in the turning Turk dramas.22 That
Islamic conversion was inextricably linked with the permanent mark of
circumcision – and conflated with castration – in the English imagina-
tion underscores its conception as a bodily conversion. In The Virgin
Martyr, Spungius and Hircius’s dialogue is peppered with references
Recycled Models 83
to the status of the foreskin as an indicator of religious faith, such as
the one contained in Spungius’s oath: “As I am a Pagan, from my cod-
peece downward” (2.1.75). The following exchange in which Spungius
and Hircius are first introduced to the audience bears no affinity to
the medieval virgin martyr legend but could easily be lifted from an
adventure play set in a contemporary Mediterranean port:
Spung. Turne Christian, wud he that first tempted mee

to haue my shooes walk vpon Christian
soles, had turn’d me into a Capon, for I am sure now the
stones of all my pleasure in this fleshly life are cut off.
Hirc. So then, if any Coxecombe has a galloping de-
sire to ride, heres a Gelding, if he can but sit him. (2.1.1–6)
Spungius and Hircius’s frequent allusions to circumcision and castra-

tion in The Virgin Martyr frame the story of Dorothy’s martyrdom – or
her refusal to convert – with the contemporary threat of conversion
associated with Muslims and Jews. Their comical collapsing of the
distinction between circumcision and castration draws upon an estab-
lished trope of the Mediterranean adventure drama. In addition, they
capitalize upon the adventure drama’s frequent association of Islamic
conversion with buggery, an association informed by stereotypes about
Muslim sexual perversity as well as by the assumption that circumci-
sion, and its slippery relationship to castration, opened one up to anal
penetration. By conflating religious circumcision with the eunuchs
known to serve in Turkish palaces, the trope also offered a way of
emasculating non-Christian men as well as the Christian renegades who
converted to Islam. The Renegado’s Carazie, for instance, is revealed to
be a former Englishman who was captured by Turks and castrated in
order to serve as a eunuch in the royal palace. His role as the Muslim
princess’s bedfellow convinces the foolish Christian servant Gazet to
volunteer to become a eunuch as well. Similarly, the clownish Clem of
Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I becomes the butt
of jokes when he undergoes conversion and castration to improve his
social status, whereas John Ward’s implied circumcision in A Christian
Turned Turke helps to convey the gravity and irredeemability of his
transgression. In The Virgin Martyr, references to castration are rel-
egated to the comic realm, far removed from the grave repercussions
of Ward’s conversion or the ancient significance of circumcision associ-
ated with Christianized Jews. But in other ways, the play confuses its
contexts. Spungius’s comparison of being “turn’d into a Capon” and
“walk[ing] vpon Christian soles” seems to associate circumcision with
Christianity, which in the context of first-century Christianized Jews
(predating the fourth-century setting of the play) might have made
sense; yet the fact that such a prospect represents something highly
unappealing to Spungius aligns it with the contemporary threat of
turning Turk and the compulsory circumcision/castration undergone by
Christian characters in other Mediterranean adventure plays.
As is also the case with the renegade clowns of the adventure drama,
the comic vacillations of Spungius and Hircius point up the differ-
ence between the tangible mark of circumcision/castration and the
always unverifiable nature of sincere religious conversion. Bemoaning
the fact that becoming a Christian has meant relinquishing pleasures
of the flesh, Spungius exclaims that he might as well have been cas-
trated. Hircius then suggests that he’s ready for action if any man
happens to want “to ride . . . a gelding.” His easy transposition of
Spungius’s figurative reference into a literal understanding of castra-
tion points to the comical problems created by the serial backsliding
of these clown figures and the contrasting permanence of circumcision
or castration. As Holly Crawford Pickett has insightfully argued, the
play’s mockery of Spungius and Hircius offers a commentary on “the
[domestic] crisis instigated by multiple apostasy and the attendant ques-
tions of the proper roles of reason and theatricality within conversion”;
as she observes, “Dorothea’s low-life servants . . . convert, unconvert,
reconvert, and half-convert a dizzying eight times between them in the
course of the play.”23 In a sense, these characters’ crude opposing of
sexual pleasure to castration, mediated across a boundary of religious
conversion, exposes the logic that motivates their repeated confessional
shifts. Similarly, in the turning Turk dramas, clown figures are drawn
to Islamic conversion because they overvalue and misread the meaning
of castration, interpreting the prospect of becoming a eunuch as a pro-
motion in social status or an easy way of gaining sexual access to the
Sultan’s harem. Like Spungius and Hircius they invert the significance
of religious conversion by reducing it to the cut of castration, which
they understand in purely sexual terms. And in similar ways, the adven-
ture plays depict castration as a permanent punishment for submitting
to conversion for the wrong reasons, branding the serial convert with a
mark that cannot be undone.
On another level The Virgin Martyr’s setting in Cappadocia invoked
a biblical association with circumcision because of its proximity to
Galatia, where Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians. As I discussed
in Chapter 1, Paul chastises the Galatians for their strict adherence to
Jewish laws and in particular for their undue emphasis on circumci-
sion, arguing that these outward rituals created a false distinction
between Jewish followers of Christ and converted Gentiles who were
Recycled Models 85
not circumcised. Alternately, the possibility that Dekker and Massinger
were confusing Caesarea, Cappadocia, where Dorothea’s medieval
legend is set, with another Caesarea – on the coast of Palestine –
links the play to another biblical site where circumcision was fiercely
debated. Peter’s conversion of a Roman centurion named Cornelius in
the Acts of the Apostles leads to a heated controversy about the eligibil-
ity of uncircumcised Gentiles for Christian conversion (Acts 10–11).
Whether consciously enacted or not, Dekker and Massinger’s possible
conflation of the two Caesareas in The Virgin Martyr reinforces the
biblical significance of the setting as a place where questions about the
nature of faith, bodily difference, and conversion were of particular
concern.
Protestant Valences, Catholic Embodiment
Given the multilayered geographical and religious context I have been

discussing for The Virgin Martyr, critical interpretations that stress only
the play’s relationship to a Catholic-Protestant binary opposition seem
inadequate. And yet it is important to recognize the extent to which the
play engages Reformation polemic by refiguring its Catholic source mate-
rials to ally Dorothea with Protestantism and her pagan persecutors with
Catholicism. Susannah Brietz Monta demonstrates the presence of “com-
peting martyrdoms” generated by Catholic-Protestant competition, and,
echoing Julia Gasper, argues that the play should be read as Protestant
propaganda aimed at critiquing England’s abandonment of Continental
Protestants at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.24 In several crucial
ways, the play refigures its Catholic source to align Dorothea with
Protestantism and her pagan prosecutors with Catholicism. For example,
the pagans are repeatedly demonized for their tendency to worship images
and statues of false gods, whereas Dorothea consistently repudiates this
practice like a good Protestant iconoclast. A particularly transparent
example of how the Christian-pagan opposition maps onto the debate
around idolatry occurs when Caliste and Christeta, two pagan maidens,
are sent to sway Dorothea from her Christian faith. In response to their
testimony to the “pleasure” and “prosperity” promised by their pagan
gods, whom they “worship . . . in their images,” Dorothea offers a parable
that exposes the folly of worshipping material forms (3.1.162). She nar-
rates a trajectory by which the “richest Iewels and purest gold” taken
from matrons’ necks are reformed into a religious “Idoll” and then into a
“basing” for washing a concubine’s feet, before being transformed again
into the form of the god (3.1.167–82). In demonstrating the fungibility
of materials used to make religious idols, Dorothea exposes the folly of
equating material substances with anything bearing godly powers.
The Virgin Martyr evokes an additional Protestant valence through
its immediate resonance with the powerful martyrological tradition
established through John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. First published in
1563 and available in six editions by 1610, Foxe’s compilation pro-
vided a contextual framework for reading Christian martyrdom in
Reformation terms. Significantly, the first book of the Book of Martyrs,
entitled in the 1570 edition “The state of the primitive churche compared
with this latter church of Rome,” is devoted to the ten persecutions of
the “primitive” church, including the final persecution of Christians
under Diocletian and Maximian.25 Toward the end of this section, St.
Dorothy’s name is briefly included in a long list of other martyrs; she
appears in the same manner in all editions of Foxe, and this is the extent
of her inclusion in the text. As Foxe explains, the abbreviated treatment
of Dorothy and other early Christian martyrs (who were so celebrated
by the medieval virgin martyr legends) reflects his disdain for the sup-
posed “fabulous inventions” and “superstitious deuotion” of Catholic
saints’ lives.26 Nevertheless, in presenting “the state of the primitive
church” as a precursor or model for understanding the subsequent
persecutions enacted by the “latter church of Rome,” Foxe proposes
the same link between early Christian persecution and the Catholic
persecution of Protestants implicitly presented in The Virgin Martyr. In
other words, the use of early Christian persecution to frame contempo-
rary religious threats was already familiar to early modern audiences
through the wide circulation of the Book of Martyrs.27
But if The Virgin Martyr’s Protestant coherences help to mollify
potential objections to the post-Reformation dramatization of a
Catholic saint’s legend, they do not fully characterize the play’s
content. Rather, Dekker and Massinger’s adaptation of Dorothy’s
martyrdom insists upon retaining the bodily emphasis of its medieval
sources - exemplified through Dorothea’s physical virginity and her
miraculous imperviousness - suggesting that her Protestant disdain
for material forms and matters of the flesh may be literally less than
skin deep. The play’s insistence on Dorothea’s inviolable body, I
argue, prevails in the face of the spiritualizing, or dematerializing,
influences of Protestant reform and constitutes a form of resistance
warranted by the bodily threat of conversion associated with turning
Turk. Identifying The Virgin Martyr’s complex negotiation of both
Catholic and Protestant templates reveals the significance of its dis-
tinct strategy of bodily resistance. As both Monta and Huston Diehl
have observed, narratives of Protestant martyrdom, themselves, do not
Recycled Models 87
emerge in a vacuum but were self-consciously linked to the earlier genre
of the medieval saint’s tale.28 Diehl argues that Foxe “appropriates the
images and forms of the medieval past only to subvert and reinterpret
them” and suggests that his strategy of differentiating Protestantism
from Catholicism is dialectic, rather than oppositional.29 This process
of dialectical appropriation and refiguration, which I uncover in the
early seventeenth-century invention of a sexually chaste and physically
inviolable heroine, is useful for understanding how the relationship
between constancy of spirit and physical torture in Foxe differs from its
representation in the medieval Catholic tradition.
Torture in Protestant and Catholic Martyrological Traditions
In Foxe, the martyr’s resistance to torture is meant to show how the

physical and spiritual are distinct: the inner, spiritual self remains
untouched regardless of what happens to the body. For example, after
Anne Askew is tortured on the rack, she describes herself as “nigh
dead” and must be “laid in a bed with as weary and painfull bones as
ever had pacient Job”; but despite her physical suffering and the threat
of being sent to Newgate, she tells the Lord Chancellor, “I wold rather
die, than to breake my faith.”30 In contrast to Foxe’s martyrs, the
medieval virgin’s resistance to physical torture conveys the inviolable
nature of her body itself. The miraculous restoration of her physical
perfection, rather than the endurance of a separate spiritual self, is the
point. In other words, the physical itself constitutes the sign of con-
stancy, rather than being evidence that spiritual constancy endures even
when the physical is violated.31 John Bale’s introduction to his edition of
The first examinacyon of Anne Askew (1546) exemplifies this distinc-
tion by paralleling Askew’s constancy with a “lyke faythfull” woman
named Blandina, who was martyred at Lyons in the year 177.32 The
comparison is intended to illuminate Askew’s ties to an older tradition
of martyrdom; however, the subtle differences between Askew and
Blandina are just as revealing. In response to torture from their persecu-
tors, “Blandina never fainted in torment. No more ded Anne Askewe
in sprete.”33 Whereas Blandina exemplifies her faith and virtue through
bodily resilience, Askew does so through strength of spirit.
A striking difference exists between the primary methods of torture
depicted in Foxe and in the virgin martyr legends. By far the most
common method of torture and execution described in the Book of
Martyrs is burning, an act given iconic emphasis through numerous
woodcut illustrations of martyrs engulfed in flames. According to Diehl,
Figure 2.2: “The burning of Rawlins White, Martyr,” from John Foxe, Acts and
monuments (London, 1610). Reproduced by permission of the Massachusetts Center
for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
Recycled Models 89
Figure 2.3: Torture of St. Lucy, from Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea (France,
s. XIIIex), MS HM 3027, f. 4v. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.
the repetition of enflamed bodies in Foxe’s commissioned illustrations

discourages idolatry and disrupts the devotional gaze by encouraging
readers to apprehend martyrdom through the interplay of text and
image. In addition, as James Knapp has argued, the iconic repetition in
Foxe of the immolation of martyred bodies pointedly diverges from the
“universal or typological illustrations” associated with Catholic mar-
tyrologies, and emphasizes “not their suffering” or the distinct manner
of their deaths, but the Protestant martyrs’ “commitment to Christian
practice.”34 According to the OED, “martyr” became specifically asso-
ciated with “death by fire” only after the Reformation (and probably as
a consequence of Foxe).35
By contrast, the bodies of Catholic virgin martyrs are rarely ignited
by fire but frequently pierced, penetrated, and dismembered, as well as
threatened with rape. The tortures of St. Lucy and St. Euphemia from
Jacobus’s Legenda aurea (Figures 2.3 and 2.4) depict the saints being
penetrated through the midsection by a long sword.
Similarly, Antonio Gallonio’s Trattato de gli instrumenti di mar-
tyrio, a post-Reformation Catholic martyrology published in Rome for
a Continental audience in 1591, features forty engravings of Catholic
martyrs being penetrated by sharp instruments, beaten with cudgels,
subjected to the amputation of tongues, breasts, and limbs, stripped and
affixed to crosses and wheels, and dragged through the streets by horses
Figure 2.4: Torture of St. Euphemia, from Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea
(France, s. XIIIex), MS HM 3027, f. 128r. Reproduced by permission of the
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
(see Figures 2.5 and 2.6).36 Though the martyrs’ bodies are pierced,
penetrated, dismembered, strung up, beaten, broiled, stretched, and
dragged, their faces betray a peaceful countenance.37 In the Catholic
tradition, the only thing that bears a permanent physical effect on the
martyrs is the final death blow, and even in the moment of death, their
bodies often remain unscarred.
The Spectacle of Violence
Revealing her ties to the Catholic martyrological tradition, Dorothea

in The Virgin Martyr is constantly threatened with physical torture,
as well as dragged by her hair, tied to a pillar and beaten, and finally
beheaded. A distinctive element of this violence is its enactment upon
a body that is completely inert, vulnerable, often restrained by cords
or other contraptions, and yet of a physical materiality and integrity
that persist beyond all efforts to undo them. Despite their increasing
exertions, Dorothea’s persecutors find that torture has no effect on her
body. They marvel that with every blow, “her face / Has more bewitch-
ing beauty than before” (4.2.94–5), and question whether the “bridge
of her nose” is “full of iron worke” (4.2.98) or the cudgels being used
against her are “counterfeit” (4.2.99). Rather than beg for mercy,
Recycled Models 91
Figure 2.5: Christian Martyrs, from Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di
martyrio (Rome, 1591), sig. H2r. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Charles
Lea Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Figure 2.6: Christian Martyrs, from Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di
martyrio (Rome, 1591), 119. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Charles Lea
Library, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Dorothea patiently endures and even welcomes the torture inflicted

upon her. After receiving a sentence of death, she remarks,
The visage of a hangman frights not me;
The sight of whips, rackes, gibbets, axes, fires
Recycled Models 93
Are scaffoldings, by which my soule climbes vp
To an Eternall habitation. (2.3.166–9)
The metaphor of her soul climbing up to heaven via “scaffoldings”

composed of torture devices figures the soul as a physical entity and
reinforces an affinity between body and spirit. Indeed it is quite likely
that the ladder used for Dorothea’s execution was the same stage prop
used to represent her physical ascent into heaven. Thus, The Virgin
Martyr sets up an understanding of spiritual faith and salvation that
is inseparable from the physical: the soul depends on the physical vio-
lence inflicted on the body in order to make its way to heaven. Even the
word “habitation,” used to describe the soul’s final destination, sug-
gests a physical space.38 Furthermore, the various torture devices that
Dorothea lists – “whips, rackes, gibbets, axes, fires” – conjure images of
violence that have a strong visceral connotation, recalling the Catholic
instruments of the passion. In this way, they are quite unlike the almost
exclusive use of fire that obliterates Protestant bodies in Foxe. The play
references such instruments of torture a second time when, following
Theophilus’s conversion, he requests that the “thousand engines / Of
studied crueltie” that he has been storing in his own house be seized
and used against him (5.2.182–3). He even begs to be allowed to
“feele / As the Sicilian did his brazen bull,” referencing one of the same
cruel devices pictured in Gallonio’s Counter-Reformation martyrology
(5.2.184–5).39
The bodily emphasis of Catholic martyrdom resonates with the
performance of Christ’s passion in the medieval mystery plays and
with narratives of host desecration.40 The inviolable virgin’s body, the
crucifixion of Christ, and the bleeding host are deeply powerful pre-
cisely because they epitomize presence and wholeness – a melding of
body and spirit that bespeaks holiness – while perhaps simultaneously
concealing an anxiety about physical absence or lack. The broader
Christian resonance of Dorothea’s torture is reinforced in The Virgin
Martyr by the fact that it is carried out by her former servants, Hircius
and Spungius, who have turned apostate against her. Upon being
confronted with her tormenters, Dorothea exclaims,
You two! whom I like fosterd children fed,
And lengthen’d out your starued life with bread:
You be my hangmen! whom when vp the ladder
Death hald you to be strangled, I fetcht downe,
Clothd you, and warmed you, you two my tormenters. (4.2.79–83)
Just as the conventional stripping and torturing of the virgin martyr

recalls the mutilation of Christ’s naked body, this scene evokes Christ’s
crucifixion, wherein Christ sacrifices his flesh to save the souls of those
who have sinned against him. Dorothea’s identification of her crucifiers
as “foster children” suggests a number of possible connotations, includ-
ing Christ’s betrayal by Judas and by Peter, his betrayal by the Jews
and converted Gentiles of Israel, and perhaps most tantalizingly, the
Christian view of Islam as an illegitimate offspring of Christianity. The
comedic status of Dorothea’s tormenters complicates these connota-
tions, in one sense mocking the serious portrayal of Christ’s passion in
the medieval Catholic tradition, but in other ways replicating equivoca-
tions inherent to the Corpus Christi plays about the presence or absence
of Christ’s body.41 In addition, the potential comedy of the scene
mitigates the violence done to Dorothea’s body, while at the same time
underscoring the play’s investment in her embodied virtue by refusing
to subject her to more efficacious blows.
What is more, the play preserves Dorothea’s bodily integrity by
suggesting that she is protected from harm by “divine powers”
(4.2.85). Though she welcomes the tortures, saying, “tyrants strike
home / And feast your fury full” (4.2.92–3), her tormentors’ blows
are miraculously deprived of any effects. As Nova Myhill argues,
Dorothea’s imperviousness to the torture calls attention to the “coun-
terfeit” theatrical nature of the spectacle, which the play pits against
the generic conventions of martyrdom that insist upon the true miracle
of her physical resilience.42 I would argue that the combined effects of
the comedic tormentors, the scene’s self-reflexive theatricality, and the
representation of an authentic miracle also serve to sustain a tension
between the threat of bodily penetration and the comforting assurance
that Christian resistance will prevail. In a sense, the high stakes associ-
ated with preserving this delicate balance compel the play’s authoriza-
tion of supernatural forces generated through miracle – phenomena
largely associated with Catholicism. These stakes, though ostensibly
associated with ancient pagan conversion, are partly informed by
contemporary anxieties about Turkish persecution, forced conversion
to Islam, and, in particular, the ways that these threats became cen-
tered on the penetration of Christian bodies. For English audiences,
Dorothea’s impervious physical body renders visible proof of Christian
triumph even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
Certainly, another part of what made this material good theater
was its sadistic and titillating nature. Despite the divine intervention
that renders Dorothea’s tortures ineffectual, the scene nonetheless pro-
duces a spectacle of her body being tied to a pillar and beaten by two
men. As Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) seems to bear
out for modern audiences, this spectacle of violence was potentially
Recycled Models 95
erotic and thrilling in the way that pornography might be considered
thrilling. Importantly for the stage, what signifies as martyrdom in one
register signifies as visual sadism in another – a duality that applied not
only to early modern theater but to medieval saints’ plays and virgin
martyr legends as well.43 In addition to its reputation for old-fashioned
plays, the capacious Red Bull amphitheater, where The Virgin Martyr
was performed, had a particular penchant for drawing large crowds
to witness shocking scenes and violence.44 To some degree The Virgin
Martyr’s predilection for Catholic torture was also more practical for
the theater, in that it could be simulated more easily and more convinc-
ingly than the Protestant igniting of bodies. But I would suggest that the
specific spectacle of sadistic torture inflicted upon an inviolable body
held a particular appeal of its own in the early seventeenth century.
It was this particular aspect of martyrdom that resurfaced in plays
dramatizing the threat of Islam to contemporary Christendom. The
thrusting of Oriana’s virginal body onto the scaffolding in The Knight
of Malta, the binding of Vitelli “in heavy chains / That eat into his
flesh” in The Renegado, and the hoisting of Sir Thomas Sherley’s body
onto the rack in The Travails of the Three English Brothers attested
to the physical pressures of religious conversion in places like Malta,
Tunis, and Constantinople.45 The threat of sadistic Turkish violence
against Christians was enhanced by its correlation with a real-life
danger (Christians were being captured and tortured in the Ottoman
empire), and in this sense its resonance with a history of Catholic
torture and martyrdom offered a particularly empowering model of
resistance. Early seventeenth-century sermons preached by Edward
Kellet, Henry Byam, Charles Fitzgeoffrey, and William Gouge for the
Christian recovery of Islamic converts emphasize the superiority of
choosing martyrdom over conversion; Byam specifically holds up the
example of early Christian “Women-Martyrs . . . Witnesse S. Agnes
at 12. yeeres old; Cecilia, Agatha, & a world besides.”46 As I will con-
tinue to argue, the mercilessly penetrated but ultimately impermeable
Catholic body retained in the face of Islam an appeal that superseded
both the material and commercial concerns of the stage, as well as the
spiritualizing influence of the Reformation.
Turkish Torture of Christian Captives
The visual tradition of Catholic martyrdom bears some striking resem-

blances to seventeenth-century representations of Christian torture at
the hands of Turks. A pamphlet printed at Oxford in 1617, entitled
Figure 2.7: A scene of Turkish torture from Christopher Angell, A Grecian, who
tasted of many stripes inflicted by the Turkes (Oxford, 1617), sig. A4r. Reproduced
by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Christopher Angell, a Grecian, who tasted of many stripes inflicted

by the Turkes, features a crude woodcut of two Turks beating a
martyr whose arms and legs are bound to a rectangular frame (Figure
2.7).47 In his narrative, Angell explains that he was “bound hand, and
foot in maner of a crosse vpon the earth” while “two men dipping
their rods in salt water began to scourge me, and when the one was
lifting vp his hand, the other was ready to strike, so that I could take
no rest, and my paine was most grievous: and so they continued
beating me, saying, turne Turke, and we will free thee.”48 Angell
endures this painful torment by meditating on Christ’s passion and
especially on the torture of former Christian martyrs, who “were
fleshly men, and sinners, yet by the grace of God were strengthened
to die.”49 Subsequently, he is able to withstand the physical pressure
to convert and even attests to a miraculous revival after being beaten,
he claims, to death: “I was perfectly dead, and so remained for the
Recycled Models 97
space of an houre, and againe after an houre, by the grace of God I
revived.”50 In emphasizing tremendous resistance and the miraculous
revival of his dead body by God, Angell’s narrative resonates with a
template of Catholic martyrdom.
Similarly, Francis Knight’s A relation of seaven yeares slaverie
under the Turkes of Argeire, suffered by an English captive merchant,
printed at London in 1640, draws an implicit parallel between Catholic
martyrdom and Turkish persecution by detailing tortures similar to
those depicted in Counter-Reformation martyrologies like those of
Antonio Gallonio and Richard Verstegan.51 This pamphlet contains
a woodcut of a Christian being scourged by a Turk (Figure 2.8), and
painstakingly describes the sadistic tortures that the author witnessed
against Christians in Algiers: “Some were crucified, others having their
bones broken, were drawled along the streets at horse tailes, others
had their shoulders stab’d with knives, and burning Torches set in
them dropping downe into their wounds; the Turkes biting of their
flesh alive, so dyed, and foure of them being walled in were starved to
death.”52
In a similar vein, the frontispiece to William Okeley’s Eben-ezer; or,
a small monument of great mercy, appearing in the miraculous deliv-
erance of William Okeley (Figure 2.9) features images of a Christian
strung upside down by his feet on a rod and beaten with a baton; a
Christian being dragged across the ground by a horse while another
Christian has his hair set on fire; and a Christian affixed to a wheel
and being beaten with a sharp instrument. Like the visual tradition of
Catholic martyrdom, these images of Turkish persecution all emphasize
gruesome and painful bodily torment, as well as the merciless sadism of
the torturers.53 Similar accounts of graphic bodily tortures perpetrated
by Muslim Turks are featured in John Rawlins’s The famous and won-
derful recovery of a ship of Bristoll (1622), Henry Blount’s A voyage
into the Levant (1636), and even the travel manuscript of East India
Company merchant Peter Mundy.54
Importantly, Dorothea’s martyrdom in The Virgin Martyr highlights
the spiritual benefits of enduring torture over the easier path of Muslim
conversion. In addition, her reminder of the rewards of a Christian
afterlife allay fears about the prospect of death. In resignifying death
as triumphant resistance, Dorothea’s martyrdom subverts the play’s
classification as a “tragedy” on its first edition title page (1622) and
transforms it into a comedy of salvation. Convinced of the heavenly
bliss that follows a death by martyrdom, Dorothea models for the male
protagonist the eternal advantages that may be achieved through a com-
paratively brief period of suffering. Prior to his conversion, Antoninus
Figure 2.8: “The manner of Turkish tyrannie over Christian slaves,” from Francis
Knight, A relation of seaven yeares slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire, suffered
by an English captive merchant (London: 1640), frontispiece. Reproduced by
permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
views Dorothea’s impending execution as an irrevocable tragedy and

begs Artemia to allow him to be sacrificed in her place: “Preserue this
temple (builded faire as yours is) / And Caesar neuer went in greater
triumph / Than I shall to the scaffold” (2.3.157–9). By contrast, death
is not tragic at all for Dorothea; rather, it represents a hastening to her
reward in heaven, the longed-for union with her true bridegroom, and
a means to the eternal preservation of her perfect chastity. She counsels
Antoninus that his fear of death is misguided: “you onely dread / The
stroke, and not what followes when you are dead” (2.3.130–1). In
this way, the play offers an empowering model for reconceptualizing
Recycled Models 99
Figure 2.9: Frontispiece, from William Okeley, Eben-ezer; or, A small monument of
great mercy, appearing in the miraculous deliverance of William Okeley (London,
1684). Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
options even in the face of overwhelming persecution. In other words,

far better to embrace martyrdom – and reap the infinite rewards of
heaven – than to permanently damn one’s soul by capitulating to the
pressure to convert.
Rape and Virginity
Like the threat of sadistic physical torture, the threat of rape – a threat
generally absent from Protestant martyrologies – unites the tradition
of Catholic saints’ tales and the cultural construction of Christian
vulnerability to Turks. In medieval virgin martyr legends the threat of
rape plays a distinct and crucial role. Unlike other forms of torture, the
implied irreversibility of rape suggests that it eradicates the very thing
constitutive of female sainthood. As Caroline Walker Bynum writes of
The Golden Legend, “the major achievement of holy women is dying
in defense of their virginity.”55 In effect, the saint’s final martyrdom
helps to ensure the perpetual preservation of her virginity. In contrast
to medieval martyrs, Foxe’s Protestant martyrs are not virgins, though
they may well be models of Christian virtue. Unlike virgin martyrs,
whose miraculously preserved virginity reveals their innate virtue,
Protestant martyrs are not distinguished by their sexual or physical
constancy. Whereas the spiritual endurance of the Protestant martyr is
meant to de-emphasize his or her physical body, the Catholic tradition
of martyrdom revolves around the resilient physicality of the virgin’s
body – its deliberate gendering, its intactness, its oneness with the soul,
and its physical materialization of sexual and spiritual chastity.
At the same time, the threat of rape and its physical implications
take on a new significance in The Virgin Martyr, and in early modern
England, that I want to argue registers the culture’s anxieties sur-
rounding Islamic conversion. Dekker and Massinger’s representation
of Dorothea’s virginity and threatened rape are striking in that they
are emphasized far more in the play than in medieval versions of her
legend. Whereas in Bokenham, Caxton, and Villegas’s versions of
Dorothea’s legend, the threat of rape is largely implicit, in the play,
Antoninus is directly commanded to rape Dorothea. Affronted by the
emasculation of his lovesick son, whose advances Dorothea repeatedly
rejects, the pagan governor of Caesarea orders Antoninus to
Breake that enchanted Caue, enter, and rifle
The spoyles thy lust hunts after; I descend
To a base office, and become thy Pandar
In bringing thee this proud Thing, make her thy Whore,
Thy health lies here, if she deny to giue it,
Force it, imagine thou assaulst a towne,
Weake wall, too’t, tis thine owne, beat but this downe. (4.1.72–8)
The violence conveyed through Sapritius’s instructions to “breake,”
“enter,” “rifle,” “force,” “assaul[t],” and “beat . . . downe” Dorothea’s
chastity is striking in its bluntness. In addition, whereas medieval virgin
Recycled Models 101
martyr legends tend to emphasize the pagan persecutor’s recourse to
other forms of torture or a sentence of death in response to the virgin’s
sexual rejection, the play subjects Dorothea to a threat of rape that is
pointed and persistent. Sapritius construes the rape of Dorothea’s body
as necessary to restoring Antoninus’s male body to health, but he also
perceives the value of her rape in and of itself. When Antoninus fails to
execute his father’s command, Sapritius demands that the “slave from
Brittaine” be fetched from the galleys to carry out the deed. He then
orders that slave to “drag that Thing [Dorothea] aside / And rauish
her” (4.1.149–50). When the slave refuses, Sapritius bellows, “Call in
ten slaues, let euery one discouer / What lust desires, and surfet here his
fill, / Call in ten slaues” (4.1.167–8).
While it would be inaccurate to say that the medieval martyr’s
physical virginity was less essential or central than it is in Dekker
and Massinger’s play, Dorothea’s virginity seems to assume a differ-
ent function in the later context. 56 Certainly, as Monta points out,
the fact of Dorothea’s vowed virginity, coupled with the presumably
greater vulnerability of her female body, works to underscore both
the excessive cruelty of her persecutors and the remarkable power of
God that renders her impervious to physical suffering.57 But I want
to suggest that the play’s heightening of emphasis around Dorothea’s
vowed virginity and threatened rape also betrays a deepening invest-
ment in the significance of sexual penetration with respect to reli-
gious conversion. Whereas Monta urges an allegorical reading of
Dorothea’s virginity, suggesting that it “has as much to do with her
unwillingness to be dominated by a pagan husband as with her desire
to maintain her virginity per se,” I contend that Dorothea’s vow of
virginity signifies in a way that is literal and embodied.58 Indeed,
Dorothea continues to cite her vowed virginity as the reason for
rejecting Antoninus’s marriage proposal even after he converts
from paganism to Christianity; she then goes on to convince him of
the virtues of assuming a life of celibacy as well. The spectacle of
Dorothea’s execution, which consists of an onstage beheading, func-
tions on some level as physical proof that her virginity remains intact,
that she has not been raped and is now eternally protected from this
threat. Her final words, just before “her head is struck off,” attest to
this, her most fervent hope for her own legacy: “Say this of Dorothea,
with wet eyes, / She lived a virgin and a virgin dies” (4.3.178–9). This
reconfirmation of her intact virginity serves as the essential sign that
she remains a Christian, that she has not been converted, and that her
spiritual purity is necessarily expressed through the physical status of
her untarnished sexual body.
Part of what informs this emphasis on physical virginity with
respect to conversion, I want to argue, are the embodied and
proto-racialized ramifications that attended contemporary threats
of Christian-Muslim conversion. In popular plays and other nar-
ratives about Turkish persecution, the sexual threat of Muslims is
played up through characterizations of the excessive sexual libido of
Muslim men, the seductive charms of Muslim women, and Islam’s
general permissiveness toward sexual promiscuity. As reflected in
the epigraph for this chapter – a Christian woman’s exclamation
in Machiavelli’s The Mandrake that she has “such terrible fears of
being impaled by a Turk” – Christian fears about Muslims center on
penetration, carrying a connotation that is distinctly sexualized. The
idea of “being impaled by a Turk” references the aggressive lust
associated with Turkish men and hints at the equally threatening
possibility that Christian women might find such a prospect appeal-
ing. Plays such as John Mason’s The Turke (c.1607) and Thomas
Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen (c.1600) seem
to pick up on the latter possibility, presenting Christian mistresses as
willing accomplices to their Muslim love-interests. The Renaissance
stage’s conflation of sexual intercourse and conversion draws upon
a longstanding cultural tradition of associating Turks with lust, and
Muslim conversion with heterosexual seduction, which had roots in
Continental romance and other medieval genres. However, I want
to suggest that interfaith sexual penetration assumed an immediate,
bodily significance on the early modern stage.
The rape of a Christian virgin by a Turk was understood not only to
physically destroy her maidenhead but also contaminate her bloodline
if she should become impregnated. While the boundary of difference
between Christian and Muslim was ostensibly figured through religion,
the rather crude causal correlation between sexual intercourse and con-
version on the stage demonstrates the intertwinement of religious and
proto-racial categories. As Ania Loomba explains, “Sexuality is central
to the idea of ‘race’ understood as lineage, or as bloodline, because the
idea of racial purity depends upon the strict control of lineage.”59 The
idea that sexual behavior controlled bloodlines created anxieties about
female sexuality that were exacerbated by the role Christian women
were perceived to play in sustaining Turkish dynasties. Both Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs and Hakluyt’s Principall Nauigations (1589, 1598,
1600) allude to the particular vulnerability of Christian women to
Turkish abduction, conversion, and sexual enslavement in Islamic
harems. Similarly, John Barclay in The mirrour of mindes, or, Barclays
icon animorum claims that the Turkish emperor preferred to beget
Recycled Models 103
royal heirs on captured Christian women: “From hence [Christian
captives] are his wiues and concubines, and always the mother of that
heire that must succeede in so great an Empire.”60 The integration of
Christian women into royal Turkish families (like Safiye, concubine
and Sultana Valide of Murad III, and mother of Mehmed III) demon-
strated Christian women’s direct, reproductive roles in the perpetuation
of Turkish dynasties. The pervasive threat of rape in the turning Turk
dramas and its consistent, miraculous evasion speak to the emerging
racial threat bound up in this notion of conversion.
However, unlike accounts of real-life Turkish concubines, the
dramatic stage never represented the successful sexual violation of a
Christian woman by a Turk. Whereas Christian men frequently con-
quered the bodies of (conveniently fair-skinned) eastern women on
the stage, reinforcing what Lynda Boose has called a “fantasy of male
parthenogenesis,” which posited the unequivocal genetic dominance
of the male’s racial features, Christian women were never conquered
by Turkish men.61 But just as the absence of such a union preserved
the fantasy that race could be controlled through a logic of male domi-
nance, it also betrayed the anxious knowledge that the physical traits of
the Turk would be passed to the offspring regardless of who the father
was. While Protestant investments in a Christian universalism based on
a “circumcision of the heart” suggested that religious affiliation was in
itself intangible, religious difference became distinctly embodied in con-
junction with the figure of the Turk. Though in The Virgin Martyr, the
pagans are not explicitly associated with racialized features, the overde-
termined threat of rape in this play is inflected by fears about the forced
sexual penetration and conversion of Christians by Turks, a resonance
that could not have eluded its seventeenth-century audience.
Other Red Bull Martyr Plays
The production of similar plays performed at the Red Bull Theatre

around the same time period suggests that the outdated models and
tropes exemplified in The Virgin Martyr were not unique to this play,
and that they assumed a broader cultural significance around 1620 that
made them popular with English audiences. Both Henry Shirley’s The
Martryed Soldier (1619) and the anonymous Two Ladies of London
and the Converted Conjuror (1623) center on the pagan persecution
of Christians under the Roman empire, and in both plays martyrdom
serves as an exemplary strategy of Christian resistance and conver-
sion. Like The Virgin Martyr, they draw upon and refigure Catholic
models of vowed virginity, miraculously avoided rape, and supernatu-
ral incidents of divine intervention. Moreover, their renderings of these
models within eastern Mediterranean settings of early Christian per-
secution implicitly evoke correspondences with contemporary Islamic
persecutions of Christians in the same territories.
Rape and Supernatural Interventions in The Martyred Soldier
Most likely based on the 1605 English translation of St. Victor of Vita’s
The memorable and tragical history of the persecution in Africke,
Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier dramatizes the fifth-century Vandal
persecutions that took place in North Africa. The play opens with the
Vandals returning from battle with 700 Christian captives in their pos-
session. Celebrating their victory, they boast of the many vile tortures
they have inflicted on the Christians: “Foure hundred virgins ravisht /
. . . their trembling bodies tost on the pikes / Of those that spoyl’d em
/ . . . [Others] pauncht, some starv’d, some eyes and braines bor’d out,
/ Some whipt to death, some torne by Lyons” (1.1; B2r). The captives
are ordered by the newly enthroned king of the Vandals, Henrick, to
be stripped and abandoned to “the midst of the vast Wildernesse /
That stands ’twixt [Africa] and wealthy Persia,” there to fall prey to
“famine, or the fury of the Beasts” (1.1; B4v). The only prisoner spared
is the Christian bishop Eugenius, whom the king detains in the hope of
converting him through torture and then using his influence to convert
others. Instead, King Henrick’s own general, Bellizarius, unexpectedly
converts to Christianity after being visited by an angel and witnessing
the marvelous example of the Christian captives who somehow inter-
pret torture and death as forms of triumph. After persuading both his
wife and daughter, Victoria and Bellina, also to convert to Christianity,
Bellizarius is sentenced to death by King Henrick. Bellina goes on to
convert the Vandal commander Hubert and vows to either marry him
or live a life of perpetual chastity. When Victoria pleads for her hus-
band’s life, King Hubert orders that she be raped. However, through
acts of divine intervention she is miraculously spared. In a similar
manner, the king decrees that Eugenius be stoned to death and all the
Christians massacred, but these actions are miraculously diverted and
the king himself is ultimately struck dead by a thunderbolt. At the con-
clusion of the play, the newly Christianized Hubert assumes the throne
with Bellina as his wife, and together they vow to convert the empire
and “from [their] loynes produce a race of . . . Christians unborne”
(5.1; K2r).
Recycled Models 105
Like The Virgin Martyr, The Martyred Soldier models the Christian
martyr’s invitating of torture and death as an exemplary strategy
of resistance to religious persecution, and also demonstrates how
this course of martyrdom elicits God’s protection, inspires others to
convert, and effectively transforms the tragedy of death into a form of
Christian triumph. Set in North Africa, where a contemporary scene of
Islamic persecution overlays this ancient history of Vandal persecution,
these examples take on a heightened relevancy in relation to contem-
porary threats of Islamic conversion. The play’s depictions of Christian
captivity, sadistic bodily torture, and the presumed dominance of the
Vandals over the Christians resonate with specific cultural anxieties
about the Ottoman Turks. Most tellingly, the sexual violence threat-
ened against Victoria reflects some of the ways that religious conversion
becomes intertwined with embodied, gendered, and emerging racial
implications under the early modern threat of the Turk. Paralleling the
pagan governor’s command that his son and then a Christian slave rape
Dorothea in The Virgin Martyr, King Henrick orders a camel driver to
rape Victoria. This scene, which is an invention of Shirley’s not present
in his source, explicitly cites a contemporary context through the Camel
Driver’s understanding of his task:
Camel Driver 1
. . . Is’t the King’s pleasure I should mouse her, and before all these people?
King
No, tis considered better; unbind the fury. And dragge her to some corner,
tis our pleasure, Fall to thy business freely.
Camel Driver 1
Not too freely neither; I fare hard; and drinke water, so doe the Indians, yet
who fuller of Bastards? So do the Turkes, yet who gets greater Logger-
heads? Come wench, I’ll teach thee how to cut up wild fowle.
Victoria
Guard me yon heavens. (4.3; H1r–1v)
The Camel Driver’s references to “far[ing] hard” and “drink[ing]

water” seem to acknowledge his lack of physical strength, while his
self-comparison to “Indians” and “Turkes” boosts his confidence by
reminding him that these people share his weakness and are yet are
so fertile as to produce more “bastards” and “logger-heads” than
anyone. His anachronistic reference to “Indians” and “Turks” not
only reveals the ways in which Shirley’s fifth-century Vandals are con-
ceived partly in the image of more contemporary non-Christian people,
but also capitalizes on the sexual and reproductive threats that non-
Christian men were thought to pose to Christian women. Importantly,
Muslim Turks and pagan Indians were not always conflated in the
English imagination as they are here. However, as I discuss in Chapter
1, both Muslims and pagans began to take on a new sense of difference
in the period that went beyond religion to encompass embodied and
proto-racial implications. The Camel Driver’s allusions to sexual and
reproductive consequences speak to this evolving sense of difference.
Victoria’s miraculous avoidance of rape demonstrates how the stage
resorts to the Catholic trope of divine intervention to prevent her rape
in ways that offer tangible proof of God’s protection and her uncom-
promised chastity. Although, unlike Dorothea, Victoria is married and
thus not a virgin, the lengths to which the play goes to demonstrate
the protection of her chastity against pagan contamination, and in par-
ticular its reliance on miraculous interventions, reveal the high stakes
associated with interfaith sexual penetration. The first camel driver
summoned for the task begins to drag Victoria away, when he is instan-
taneously “struck mad” and “beate[s] out his owne braines” (4.1;
Hv). The king then calls in a second camel driver, who no sooner initi-
ates the task than he is “struck blind” and then, when ordered to con-
tinue or else face certain death, is rendered deaf as well (4.1; H2r). After
the failure of the two camel drivers, the king calls for two slaves and
commands them along with his lord Epidorus to “seize her all three,
/ And ravish her by turnes,” but these would-be rapists immediately
lose control of their faculties and, according to the stage direction,
“dance Antiquely, and Exeunt” (4.1; H2r). While the Christian bishop
Eugenius cautions the onlookers to “impute not / This most miraculous
delivery / To witch-craft,” the miracles certainly demonstrate a kind
of magic that might have made them subject to Protestant charges of
Catholic superstition (4.1; H2r).
The play suggests connections to Catholic traditions and medieval
religious theater in other ways as well, presenting a spectacular resur-
rection, supernatural effects, and the regular appearance of singing
angels. After apparently succumbing to death when her prison guard
pours a scalding bowl of porridge over her head, Victoria is miracu-
lously resurrected in a scene that self-consciously borrows from the
medieval miracle play tradition. According to the stage direction,
“Victoria rises out of the cave [where she has been imprisoned] white,”
and her clothing is miraculously transformed from prisoner’s rags to a
beautiful white “habite” (5.1; Ir-v). Rather than suggest the possibility
of mocking or discounting Victoria’s resurrection, the onstage wit-
nesses to the scene, including the pagan king, are awed and enchanted
by it. In addition, the play invests with supernatural power the body
of Eugenius, identified as the historical St. Eugenius of Carthage in the
Recycled Models 107
play’s source, in ways that evoke the idolatry of Catholic relics. After
being stung by a scorpion, King Henrick is cured by drinking and
bathing in Eugenius’s blood; when the king then betrays Eugenius by
having him stoned, the stones miraculously turn as “soft as spunges”
(3.4; F4v). The play’s testimony to the efficacy of such miracles is partly
justified by its distant historical setting, but I would argue that it is also
called for by its geographical setting in a territory largely conquered
by Turks at the time of the play’s performance. In positing the healing
effects of Eugenius’s blood and the inefficacy of his torture, the play
illustrates comforting proof of how when faced with overwhelming per-
secution, as Christians enslaved in the Ottoman empire also were, mar-
tyrdom constitutes a form of resistance that is protected and rewarded
by God. This message is reinforced through the songs of the angels,
who, for example, celebrate Bellizarius’s martyrdom with the words
“Victory, victory, hell is beaten downe, / The Martyr has put on a
golden crowne; / Ring Bels of Heaven, him welcome hither” (5.1; I3r).
Moreover, the play models the importance of sexual resistance
through its example of divine protection against rape. Perversely
aroused by the spectacle of Victoria’s resurrection, King Henrick
assumes the role of lustful persecutor, but Victoria is spared by protec-
tive angels who descend around her body and shepherd her to her final
death. At the same time, a lightning bolt instantaneously strikes down
the king and kills him. It seems that such intercessions by supernatu-
ral forces, and the play’s authorization of the efficacy of miracles, are
not only justified but also necessitated by the greater cultural taboo of
engaging the consequences of Victoria’s rape. In addition, the martyr-
dom of Victoria and Bellizarius clears the stage of pagans, inspiring
willing souls to convert and engendering God’s punishment of those
who remain recalcitrant. This allows Victoria’s daughter, Bellina, and
Hubert to assume the throne and propagate a new Christian empire in
North Africa. Hubert’s concluding suggestion that he and Bellina “shall
from [their] loynes produce a race of Kings” gestures to the crucial role
of reproduction in sustaining Christian identity and empire (5.1; K2r).
If the correspondences between the Vandal persecutions of Shirley’s
play and the contemporary persecution of Christians in North Africa
are largely implicit, Shirley’s personal life gave him explicit reason to
take an interest in the plight of contemporary Christian captives. His
father, Thomas Shirley (c.1564–1633), was an English privateer and
adventurer made famous by his travels throughout the Ottoman empire
and Persia. In 1603 (when Henry was twelve), Thomas Shirley was
captured by Turks; abandoned by his crew, he was held prisoner in
Constantinople for two years. He and his two adventuring brothers,
Anthony and Robert, were the subject of John Day, George Wilkins,
and William Rowley’s 1607 stage play, The Travails of the Three
English Brothers – also performed in the Red Bull Theatre – as well as
several pamphlets. Thomas’s captivity at the hands of Turks is drama-
tized in that play, which features him tortured on the rack, pressured
to convert to Islam, and nearly martyred. He is eventually rewarded for
his steadfast resistance through release and a safe return to Christian
territory. At the same time, the play shames Thomas’s crew for aban-
doning him to the Turks and thereby choosing the path of least resist-
ance. As I have been suggesting, the fact that both ancient martyr plays
like The Martyred Soldier and Mediterranean adventure plays like The
Travails of the Three English Brothers endorse a common strategy of
resistance through martyrdom is not merely coincidental.
That these kinds of plays met a similar demand from English audi-
ences is evidenced not only by their performance in the same play-
house, but by certain aspects of their printing history. For example,
John Oakes’s publication of The Martyred Soldier was entered into
the Stationers’ Register on February 15, 1638, as “a play called The
Martyred Soldior, with the life and death of Purser Clinton.” This
reference to “Purser Clinton” actually refers to two separate English
adventurers who were executed by Queen Elizabeth for piracy and
treason. Unlike the martyrs of Shirley’s play, Clinton and Purser were
construed as renegades who valued self-interest over the more difficult
path of virtuous resistance, and thus met with the shameful death
of execution, rather than the triumphant death of martyrdom. Their
exploits and punishments were popularized for English audiences
through Thomas Heywood’s adventure play Fortune By Land and Sea
(c.1609) – also performed at the Red Bull – which represented their
cowardice and ultimate repentance in contrasting ways to the heroism
of the Shirley brothers. It is unlikely that the reference to “Purser
Clinton” in the entry for The Martyred Soldier reflects a confusion of
the two plays, since Fortune By Land and Sea was published by a dif-
ferent publisher and not until 1655. More likely, the reference relates to
a news pamphlet entitled A true relation, of the lives and deaths of two
most famous English pyrats, Purser, and Clinton, which was published
by John Oakes in 1639, and later attributed to Thomas Heywood. The
fact that the stationer acquired the publishing rights to both texts at the
same time and published them in close conjunction with one another
suggests that he was thinking about their mutual marketability. For one
thing, they were both old stories – Shirley’s play was first performed
in 1618, and Clinton and Purser came to public attention through
Heywood’s 1607 play and an earlier pamphlet printed in 1583 – that
Recycled Models 109
the stationer decided would appeal to a late 1630s audience. The two
texts differed, however, in that whereas Shirley’s play dramatizes events
from deep in the past, Heywood’s pamphlet narrates events from the
much more recent, Elizabethan past. Thus, if The Martyred Soldier
shared something with Clinton and Purser, it was not related to their
specific temporal contexts, but rather to their mutual interest in con-
ditions of cross-cultural, interreligious contact that emphasized the
virtues of Christian resistance and martyrdom.
Female Chastity as Converting Agent in The Two Noble Ladies
The anonymous Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjurer, “a

Tragecomicall Historie often tymes acted with approbation at the Red
Bull in St. Johns Street by the Company of the Reuells,” evokes even
clearer correspondences between its ancient conflict and contemporary
Christian-Muslim relations.62 It opens with the pagan Egyptian sack of
Christian Antioch during a time when both countries were subject to
Roman rule but differentiated by their religions. Suggesting a parallel
to the Ottoman sultan, the tyrannical Egyptian Souldan espouses aspi-
rations to rule the world. In plundering Antioch, he kills the Christian
king and leaves only the king’s virginal niece, Justina, as the last of that
royal race. Justina flees to Babylon to hide. Further extending his affini-
ties with the Ottoman sultan, the Souldan makes incestuous advances
on his own daughter, Miranda, who in turn also flees to Babylon and
assumes a male disguise. Justina is captured by pagan Babylonian
soldiers and threatened with rape, but is rescued at the last minute
by the cross-dressed Miranda. Justina inspires the love of Clitophon,
son to the Califfe of Babylon, who expresses a desire to convert to
Christianity. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Souldan learns that Babylon is
harboring his daughter Miranda and declares war. Miranda’s beloved,
Lysander, who is also one of the Soudan’s chief commanders, worries
over Miranda’s fate. The conjuror of the play’s title, Cyprian, informs
Lysander that his real name is Eugenius (the same as the Carthaginian
Christian saint and saintly character in The Martyred Soldier), and
that he is actually the son of the Christian king of Antioch but was
kidnapped as a youth by the Souldan’s father and raised as an Egyptian
pagan. Though Lysander later professes his loyalty to the Souldan
(perhaps disingenuously) in a dumbshow, his sympathetic identification
with Christian Antioch has been awakened.
In the second half of the play, the Babylonians capture the Souldan,
but Clitophon strikes an alliance with him after learning that his
father ordered Justina to be drowned (she is rescued by the conju-
ror). The cross-dressed Miranda proposes to the Babylonian Califfe
that he settle the conflict with Egypt by sponsoring a personal combat
between herself and Lysander, fighting on behalf of Babylon and Egypt
respectively. The conjuror Cyprian, after applying his magical arts to
advance a series of Christian causes, suddenly turns on Justina when
she rejects his sexual advances. She vows to remain a virgin or die, and
Cyprian attempts to rape her before being converted by an angel. The
angel also counsels Cyprian and Justina to return to Antioch and be
martyred. When Miranda and Lysander face off in combat, Miranda
unveils herself and the two yield to one another, proposing a peace
between Egypt and Babylon. The Califfe and Souldan are outraged and
plan to kill them, but the Roman emperor enters and enforces the peace
by reminding them of their mutual subjugation to Rome. The Souldan
then gives Antioch to Lysander, who will marry Miranda and convert
to Christianity. Though Justina refuses to marry Clitophon because
of her vowed virginity, she inspires him to convert to Christianity as
well. Together, both Miranda and Justina, the “two noble ladies” of
the play’s title, effectively extend Christianity through conversion from
the sacked Antioch to both Egypt and Babylon.
Importantly, Miranda and Justina extend conversion to pagan
men not through sexual congress but through their steadfast chas-
tity. Though pagan by birth, Miranda reveals her innate difference from
her father, the Egyptian Souldan, and her predisposition to Christian
conversion, through her natural aversion to her father’s incestuous
advances. The Souldan’s characterization in the image of the lustful
Turk is reinforced through his merciless sadism, which takes the form
of delight in planning gruesome physical tortures. When he learns that
Miranda has escaped the watch of his eunuchs who have been charged
with guarding her, he orders that their tongues and eyes be cut out and
that their bodies be hewed “in peeces,” their “dismembered limbs” dis-
played “on poles / in eu’ry quarter of the camp” (2.1.399–401). Later,
enraged by the news that Miranda has taken refuge in Babylon, the
Souldan orders his soldiers to capture her and
Mangle her enticing face,

seare vp her tempting breasts, teare wide her mouth,
and slit her nose, that thus defac’d, my hate
neither by loue nor pitty may abate. (2.1.553–6)
His desire to see her “enticing face” mangled and to “seare vp her
tempting breasts” has a sexually sadistic edge that conveys the depths
of his perversity and his tyranny, as well as his reduction of her to a
Recycled Models 111
physical spectacle oriented entirely around its effects on him. By con-
trast, Miranda’s aversion to him and her decision to remove herself
from his domain by cross-dressing and escaping to Babylon are abso-
lute and unwavering. In turn, her uncompromising separation from her
father sets off a chain of events that leads to her own and Lysander’s
conversions to Christianity as well as their possession of the throne of
Christian Antioch. When the Souldan attempts to convince Miranda
that marrying him would not be shameful because it would make
her the queen of Egypt, adding, “Thou shalt agree Miranda, we must
wed,” she replies, “Agree with death, not with a fathers bed” (1.2.182–
3). Her willingness to face death rather than fulfill her father’s inces-
tuous desires allies her with the virgin martyr tradition, underscoring
her resolute chastity and her innate distinction from her non-Christian
father.
Similarly, Justina is repeatedly threatened by pagan sexual violence
and repeatedly prizes her virginity over her life. When Babylonian
soldiers capture and attempt to rape her, she begs, “Let your relent-
less swords enter this breast / and giue my life like happie liberty”
(1.4.266–7). Making explicit their intentions of rape and reinforcing
the play’s association between male paganism and sexual sadism, one
of the soldiers responds, “No pretty one, the weapon thou shalt feele
/ shall be of milder temper then rough steele” (1.4.268–9). Later, she
endures repeated sexual advances from the black conjuror Cyprian,
to which she remains steadfast in her resistance and committed to a
vow of lifelong virginity even at the cost of her life: “Heau’n has my
vow, my life shall neuer bee / elder then my vnstain’d virginitie” (4.5;
1.1621–2). When Cyprian’s attempts to couch his desires in enticing
rhetoric fail, he resolves to use his magical powers to instill a sexual
desire in Justina:
my blacke art,
shall make your white thoughts like it.
[. . .]
hell shall force her
to offer vp that Iewell of delight
which miserlike she yet locks vp in coynesse.
With greater heat she shall desire her rape
Then I haue done. These Hells hookes she cannot scape. (4.5;
1.1635–41)
Cyprian pits his “blacke art” against Justina’s “white thoughts,” sug-
gesting a clear contrast between paganism and Christianity, one aligned
with the powers of hell and the other with those of heaven. This direct
opposition underscores the miracle by which Justina, through her
virtue and faith alone, is able to resist Cyprian’s powers and convert
him to Christianity. Despite Cyprian’s attempts to conjure sexual
desire in Justina, no such desire materializes, and instead, he senses a
transformation in himself. Ultimately, he is moved to regard her as a
“Christian Saint which I (in spite of hell) / am forc’d to worship” (5.2;
1.1751–2). Indeed, Justina’s character is based upon the virgin martyr
St. Justina, who was born in Damascus and, like Dorothy, martyred
under Diocletian in 304. According to her legend, Justina converts a
pagan magician from Antioch named Cyprian, who is hired by another
pagan man to convince her to love him. However, whereas in medieval
versions of Justina’s legend, Cyprian does not become infatuated with
Justina and attempt to rape her, and even the pagan suitor is motivated
not by lust but by a desire to win Justina’s love, The Two Noble Ladies
orients all of the pagan attacks on Justina around her sexual vulnerabil-
ity, and similarly figures her resolute chastity as the agent that converts
both Cyprian and the pagan suitor Clitophon.
The play’s characterization of the conjuror and the status of his
magic warrant closer examination, particularly in light of The Virgin
Martyr’s and The Martyred Soldier’s explicit but in some ways
anxious authorization of supernatural forces. Prior to his sexual
infatuation with Justina in Act Four, Cyprian uses his magical powers
to help Lysander and Justina. For example, when Lysander crosses
the Souldan on Miranda’s behalf, Cyprian casts a spell that instan-
taneously freezes the Souldan and his guards in place, potentially to
comical effect. Later, he rescues Justina from being drowned by con-
juring trumpeting Tritons who seize her captors and force them into
the water. In addition, he appears to work in concert with a Christian
angel when he shepherds Lysander to the banks of the Euphrates and
reveals to him the truth of his birth; immediately following this rev-
elation, an angel appears “shaped like a patriarch, vpon his breast a
red table full of silver letters, in his right hand a red crossier staffe, on
his shoulders large wings” (stage direction 3.3). Cyprian then reads
his own fate imprinted in the table: “it is the gracious heauens will, /
that now ere long, this learned heathen man / shall renounce Magicke,
and turne Christian” (3.3.1112–14). Though the angel proclaims that
he “come[s] not by the call of magicke spells,” his supernatural pres-
ence and abilities are difficult to distinguish from those of Cyprian
(3.3.1117). Similarly, Cyprian’s magic is not consistently contrasted
with that of angels: the play condones his powers and renders them
efficacious when they are directed toward Christian causes, but com-
pares them disparagingly to angelic powers when they work against
Christian causes.
Recycled Models 113
This double standard seems to describe more generally the ambiva-
lent authorization of supernatural effects to protect Christian virtue
and female chastity in all three of these Red Bull martyr plays. The
very act of Cyprian’s conversion – a conversion from paganism to
Christianity, but also from the use of black magic to that of Christian
miracle – illustrates through analogy a distinction whereby Christian
“magic” is condoned, despite its associations with Catholicism and
the medieval stage, when directed at certain causes. Specifically,
these plays legitimize miraculous or supernatural effects when they
are aimed at the intertwined imperatives of protecting the female
body and resisting Christian persecution. As I have been arguing,
the compulsion to rely on miracles in these cases reflects the high
stakes associated with the sexual penetration and conversion of
the female Christian body at a time of heightened cultural anxiety
over Muslim-Christian encounter. Like The Virgin Martyr and the
Martyred Soldier, The Two Noble Ladies invites contemporary appli-
cation through anachronistic slips, as when Cyprian attempts to woo
Justina by promising her “Indian mines,” “sweet gums and spices
of Arabia,” and other commodities of the “worlds rich merchants”
(4.5; 1.1585–8). However, the play’s resonances with the conditions
of Mediterranean trade and Ottoman imperialism are most mean-
ingfully revealed through its sexualized interpretation of religious
conversion and its anxious refusal to confront the implications of a
penetrated female Christian body.
The scene depicting Justina’s averted rape by Cyprian and his sub-
sequent conversion to Christianity is highly revealing of the play’s
complex negotiation of the supernatural and how it seems almost
despite itself to authorize supernatural effects while at the same time
orienting Christian faith against them. On the one hand, the force of
Justina’s faith is shown to overpower Cyprian’s magical arts, implying
the superior efficacy of Christian faith over magic. Discovering Justina
asleep in a chair with a prayer book in her hands, Cyprian decides to
take advantage of her vulnerability by raping her while she sleeps. The
stage direction calls for “divells about her,” suggesting that Cyprian’s
black helpers hover menacingly around the chair (5.2; 1.1753). But
when Cyprian attempts to kiss Justina, she wakes and “falls on her
knees,” then “looks in her booke, and the Spirits fly from her” (stage
direction 5.2; 1.1796–7), prompting Cyprian’s appropriately named
friend Cantharides to remark, “Her prayers haue prevailed against our
spells / . . . / Her faith beats downe our incantations” (5.2; 1.1799;
1802). Cyprian too confirms the disarming powers of Justina’s faith,
which have already begun to turn him to Christianity: “ffaire Christian
/ teach mee the sense and vse of this strong spell / call’d ffaith, that
conquers all the pow’rs of hell” (5.2; 1.1816–19).
But on the other hand, the very use of the prayer book as a
counter to Cyprian’s books of magic locates the powers of Justina’s
faith in a sacred material object. As both Elizabeth Williamson and
James Kearney have recently argued, Protestantism’s embrace of the
book, and in particular the Bible, was fraught with ambivalence.63 In
Kearney’s terms, the Reformation occasioned “a crisis of the book”:
on the one hand the book “became an emblem of the desire to tran-
scend the merely material and irredeemable fallen world of objects,”
but on the other hand reformers “distrusted the material dimension
of text, of all that might be associated with the letter rather than the
spirit.”64 In The Two Noble Ladies, the materiality of the book and
the magical efficacy of reading and speaking its prayers are precisely
what the stage emphasizes. Justina counsels Cyprian, “Doe not feare.
/ take here this booke; call on that pow’rfull name / those pray’rs so
oft repeat, and I’ll assist you” while at that moment the stage direction
dictates, “The feinds roare and fly back” (5.2; 1.1844–6; 1847). As
Cyprian continues to read in the prayer book, soft music begins to
play and the “patriarch-like Angell” enters with “his crosier staffe
in one hand, and a book in the other” (5.2; 1.1856–7). In turn, “the
Devills sinck roaring; a flame of fier riseth after them,” and the Angell
“toucheth his breast with his crosse,” saying “with this touch, let thy
carnall lust convert / to loue of heau’n” (5.2; 1.1860; 1869–70). In this
way, the angel’s book and cross are invested with the power of conver-
sion, contributing to an elaborate visual spectacle that clearly cites the
morality play tradition through its inclusion of devils and a winged
angel. The angel-as-converting-agent was also a common convention
of medieval miracle plays such as the Digby manuscript’s Conversion
of Saint Paul and the Mary Magdalene plays. Although the book and
perhaps even the cross (as distinct from a crucifix) ostensibly constitute
Protestant symbols, their use as objects that are themselves invested
with powers to convert evokes Catholic devotional practices, as do the
interventions of angels and devils through the play. Thus, even though
the preservation of Justina’s virginity and Cyprian’s miraculous conver-
sion are partly facilitated through faith and chastity, they are also aided
by sacred objects and supernatural forces.
The scene’s reliance on an angel and devils to reflect visually the
contest between Justina’s Christian faith and Cyprian’s pagan lust
engages figures with explicit confessional implications. Intercessory
angels who personally protected or assisted Christians on earth retained
a Catholic valence in the early seventeenth century that sparked
Recycled Models 115
controversy and objections from the reformed church.65 Whereas for
Catholics, intercessory agency was widely distributed among those
with supernatural powers (including angels, saints, relics, priests, the
pope, the Virgin Mary, and Christ himself), mainstream Protestants
held that intercessory power came from Christ alone. The powerful
roles of intercessory angels in all three of the plays I discuss in this
chapter have led Holly Crawford Pickett to argue that the “dazzling”
effects of angels in the Red Bull plays are not deceptive and corruptive,
as Protestant reformers claimed of Catholic idols, but rather redemp-
tive and instrumental of positive conversions.66 However, whereas
Pickett argues against reading these effects as a coded endorsement of
Catholicism, interpreting them instead as evidence of a purely secular
indulgence of theatrical spectacle, I see no reason why Catholic valences
and theatrical spectacle should be mutually exclusive. Rather, the
secular stage drew upon Catholic models and effects because, unlike
the relative material sparseness of Protestantism, they were so tangibly
powerful. While these reappropriated models did not necessarily signal
an endorsement of Catholicism for its own sake, I argue that the stage
was compelled to reauthorize them despite their controversial associa-
tions because they provided effective countermeasures to the particular
embodied and sexualized threats associated with Islamic conversion.
Female Virginity and Male Restraint
Although The Two Noble Ladies incorporates supernatural forces in

order to supplement Christian faith and resistance to rape, it also hints
at ways in which these roles can be taken up by human subjects. It does
so by offering exemplary patterns of female heroism, virtue, and con-
stancy that serve as models for male protagonists, instructing them how
to perform the role of the deus ex machina. For example, when Justina
is captured and nearly raped by the Babylonian soldiers, she calls on
angels for help, but is rescued not through supernatural interventions
but by the cross-dressed Miranda. In this way, the female heroine
Miranda models male heroism by risking her life to defend Justina
against so many opponents. Justina also serves as a model for men
through the example of her unwavering constancy. Despite Clitophon’s
many romantic overtures, Justina insists upon her vowed virginity
and, like Dorothea, expresses a willingness to die for it. Ultimately, it
is her unwavering commitment to this vow that convinces Clitophon
to convert to Christianity. When, at the conclusion of the play, the
Califfe decrees that his son shall marry Justina, she does not hesitate to
defy his authority: “No mightie Sir, / my virgin life is vow’d to heauen
now / which hath so oft preserved it” (5.2; 1.2081–3). In response,
Clitophon reveals not disappointment or anger, but his inspiration to
follow her lead by converting: “Happy maide, / Thy vow displeases not,
and thy strange story / hath wonne my heart to lay hould on thy faith”
(2084–6). Thus, Christian female constancy serves as an agent for
male redemption, a pattern that inverts constructions of the sexualized
female body as an agent of male contamination.
Ultimately, the idealization of female chastity in the Red Bull martyr
plays functions not only as a bar against interfaith sexual intercourse
and as a broader symbol of Christian resistance to conversion, but also
as a didactic model for masculine civility and sexual restraint. Whereas
in The Two Noble Ladies, the translation of female chastity into a
prescriptive for masculine behavior is mainly suggestive, The Virgin
Martyr demonstrates Dorothea’s fostering of Antoninus’s gradual con-
version over the course of the play. While Antoninus is initially drawn
to Dorothea because of sexual desire, he learns to harness this desire
and to direct his energies toward the higher cause of Christianity. His
conversion from paganism to Christianity is manifested through his
eventual departure from an economy of heterosexual desire and accept-
ance of a life of celibacy. The terms of this conversion may be under-
stood through the contrasting agendas of Dorothea and Artemia, the
marriageable daughter of Diocletian. Whereas Dorothea persuades
Antoninus to eschew marriage and bodily pleasures in exchange for
heavenly bliss, Artemia attempts to win him over to the role of husband
and, eventually, leader of Rome. Dorothea’s conversion of Antoninus
from dynastic marriage partner to celibate martyr is paralleled by
the conversion of Antoninus’s attitude toward death. Addressing
Antoninus from the place of her execution, Dorothea instructs him to
“trace my steps” (4.3.94). In following her lead, Antoninus also helps
to inspire the conversion and martyrdom of the chief pagan persecutor,
Theophilus. Together, these conversions facilitate a generic conversion,
in that the play initially sets up and then subverts the expectations
of tragedy by reinterpreting the deaths of Dorothea, Antoninus, and
Theophilus as blissful triumphs.
Perhaps most pointedly, Dorothea’s conversion of Antoninus’s
sexual behavior cultivates a code of masculine conduct that marks a
distinction between Christian and non-Christian behavior, suggesting
clear applications in contemporary intercultural contexts. The specific
manner in which Dorothea’s rape by Antoninus is diverted in effect
displaces the role of divine intervention in the other two plays with
masculine restraint, and offers a prescription for Christian chastity
Recycled Models 117
that is both physically and culturally constituted. The scene opens
with the stage direction, “A bed thrust out, Antoninus vpon it sicke,
with Physitions about him, Sapritius and Macrinus, guards” (4.1). As
Antoninus’s attendants discuss his condition, which apparently stems
from a broken heart, his friend Macrinus announces that “a Midwife”
is needed to “deliuer him” from his ailment: “[He] will I feare lose life
if by a woman / He is not brought to bed” (4.1.22–3). Macrinus contin-
ues, “stand by his Pillow / Some little while, and in his broken slumbers
/ Him shall you heare cry out on Dorothea” (4.1.24–6). In this way,
the stage is (literally) set for a recuperative sexual union to take place
between Dorothea and Antoninus. However, when Antoninus’s father
commands him to take Dorothea by “force,” Antoninus assures her,
I would not wound thine honour, pleasure forc’d
Are vnripe Apples, sowre, not worth the plucking,
Yet let me tell you, tis my father’s will
That I should seize vpon you as my prey.
Which I abhorre as much as the blackest sinne
The villany of man did euer act. (4.1.103–8)
Antoninus’s aversion to seeking “pleasure forc’d” stands in stark con-
trast to the characterization of St. Dorothy’s suitor in the play’s medi-
eval source materials. The three most prominent English translations
of her legend represent her suitor to be the prefect himself, rather than
his son. In these sources, Dorothy’s rejection of the prefect’s marriage
proposal fuels his anger to begin with and prompts him to command
that she be tortured and ultimately killed. The play’s innovation in
making Dorothea’s chief persecutor the father of her suitor, rather than
the suitor himself, produces a tension between persecutor and suitor
whereby the suitor’s restraint actually facilitates Dorothea’s evasion
of rape. In direct opposition to the mounting fury of the suitor of the
medieval legend, the play’s suitor restrains his desires and redirects
them toward a different course. Similarly, Antoninus’s sexual restraint
offers a redemptive contrast to the camel drivers, slaves, pagan soldiers,
and other would-be rapists in The Martyred Soldier and The Two
Noble Ladies, eliminating the need for supernatural interventions.
In this way Antoninus exemplifies a new model of male heroism
that also emerges in adventure plays set in the contemporary
Mediterranean.67 Cultivated by the female heroine’s example of sexual
virtue and resistance, he is a gentleman rather than a renegade. Though
distinguished in battle and other physical contests, he learns to restrain
his sexual appetite and ultimately channels his bodily desires into a
love for Christ. His affinities to the chivalric knights of medieval
romance illuminate the medieval underpinnings of Christian brotherhood
in contemporary seventeenth-century plays like The Travails of the
Three English Brothers and The Knight of Malta, which dramatize pan-
Christian opposition to the Ottoman empire. In Chapter 4, I further
examine the stage’s idealization of restrained masculinity in the face
of Muslim adversaries by foregrounding five plays that resurrect the
crusading Knights of Malta and seek to reinforce their Order’s vow of
celibacy. The Virgin Martyr brings into view the often indiscernible or
otherwise inexplicable ways in which the Renaissance stage imports
medieval models of Christian crusaders and virgin martyrs in order to
imagine effective forms of resistance to the contemporary Muslim threat.
In addition, in contrast to the frequent gendering of virgin-
ity as female in the Middle Ages, the importance of male sexual
restraint in The Virgin Martyr demonstrates an emerging fluidity
between “natural” and “cultural” constructions of racial difference
– a connection that becomes increasingly solidified by the eighteenth
century. While on the one hand, the preservation of Dorothea’s female
chastity guards against the literal contamination of her bloodline
through sexual generation, on the other hand, the exercise of male
sexual restraint suggests a social or behavioral component to racial
identity. Thus, racial identity is conceived both as a product of sexual
generation and as something that can be controlled through cultural
behavior – defined through sexual restraint, self-discipline, and civil-
ity. This model of resistance would have been particularly appealing
to early modern audiences, given their association of Christian vulner-
ability to conversion with the male traders and adventurers who were
conducting trade in the Mediterranean.
Along these lines, the British slave who refuses to carry out orders
to rape Dorothea easily evokes the condition of contemporary British
captives in the Ottoman empire. Importantly for this context, the slave
demonstrates how resistance guided by Christian principle can offer
a sense of empowerment to even the most disempowered of men. His
insistence that in refusing to obey such an order, he is merely “halfe a
slaue” rather than “a damned whole one, a blacke vgly slaue,” suggests
a way of retaining one’s Christian integrity even under the conditions
of enslavement (4.1.154–5). In addition to the contemporary applica-
tions of this message, the play’s depiction of a fourth-century British
slave serves as a reminder of Britain’s history of imperial subjugation
under Rome, offering an analogy by which England’s smallness in rela-
tion to the Ottoman empire might be perceived as somehow noble or
empowering.
But if The Virgin Martyr ultimately produces a model of masculine
behavior that is suited to a contemporary context of trade, Ottoman
Recycled Models 119
imperialism, and Muslim-Christian persecution, it does so by refigur-
ing tropes and conventions that are rooted in medieval Catholic tradi-
tions. Its cultivation of a masculine code of conduct characterized by
sexual restraint and civility is only reducible to the tangible vow of
virginity that molds and enforces it. This vow is literally and uncompro-
misingly sustained by the play’s saintly heroine. Antoninus’s reference
to wearing Dorothea’s “figure” into battle as a source of protection
offers a fitting metaphor for the way his Christian heroism is fostered
through her embodied example:
To Dorothea, tell her I haue worn,

In all the battailes I haue fought her figure,
Her figure in my heart, which like a deity
Hath still protected me. (1.1.461–3)
Reminiscent of the female images imprinted on the insides of medi-

eval shields, the “figure” of Dorothea that Antoninus wears into
battle emblematizes an emerging model of male heroism that, like
medieval knighthood, is cultivated through the example of female
chastity. Though immaterial in nature, this figure, which Antoninus
describes as “like a deity,” evokes the talismanic qualities associated
with Catholic relics. As I explore in the next chapter, it bears a resem-
blance to the holy relic worn by the Christian heroine in Massinger’s
The Renegado as a protective shield against her Turkish persecutor. The
necessity of a supplement, or prophylactic, to counteract conversion
assumes particular significance in the context of early seventeenth-
century English contact with the Ottoman empire and the proto-racial
anxieties it produced.
As I demonstrate in the following chapter, the protective strat-
egy that for a male Christian can exist as a spiritual “figure in [the]
heart” requires more tangible physical supplementation for a Christian
woman. In The Renegado, the Christian virgin has been taken pris-
oner by a Turkish basha in Tunis and receives the relic from a Jesuit
priest. Wearing it, she is immune to her Turkish suitor’s predatory
desire, which threatens every moment to violate her chastity and convert
her to Islam. Like the virgin’s intact maidenhead, it offers a physical
manifestation of her virtue – her inconvertible Christian essence. The
Christian heroine’s need for a physical prophylactic is revealing of
the deep anxieties surrounding her sexual contamination and its
potential to undo the categorical differences between “Christian” and
“Turk.” Identifying the resonance between The Virgin Martyr and con-
temporary plays like The Renegado affords not only a broader interpre-
tation of the former play but also a recognition of the medieval models
that inform Christian resistance to Islam in the latter. Moreover, these
particular strategies of resistance help us to understand the ways that
the threat of conversion has evolved in the English imagination as the
result of contemporary Christian-Muslim relations. To contain the
contemporary threat associated with turning Turk and its proto-racial
valences, the dramatic stage must reach back into the Catholic past for a
template of chastity that is both spiritually and physically constituted.
Chapter 3
Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement

and Spiritual Redemption in
The Renegado
If the plays discussed in the previous chapter suggest certain strategies

for resisting conversion to Islam through their depictions of martyr-
dom in ancient pagan settings, then Philip Massinger’s The Renegado
(c.1624) imports these models of resistance into its contemporary
North African setting. What may at first appear a disjunctive authori-
zation of seemingly Catholic objects, ceremonies, and figures in a play
about Christian-Muslim encounter makes more sense when one consid-
ers the empowering template of resistance established by contemporary
martyr plays. In the face of Islam – a threat of conversion under-
stood to involve embodied, sexual, and reproductive consequences
– Catholicism’s material, ritualistic, and embodied forms provided
compelling sources of resistance to Turkish torture and sexual viola-
tion. While in some ways The Renegado seems to celebrate the saving
powers of Pauline faith and spiritual redemption to convert a Muslim
princess to Christianity and to redeem Christian men temporarily
seduced by Islam, it also inadvertently dramatizes the limitations of
Christian spiritual faith and redemption. What is more, The Renegado
reveals the gendered implications of Islamic conversion by foreground-
ing the question of whether male and female Christians are equally
eligible for spiritual redemption if contaminated by Muslim sexual
contact. Testing the faith of Pauline universalism through differences of
gender, the play reveals the female limits of St. Paul’s spiritual univer-
salism through a heroine who is evocatively named Paulina.
As part of the recent wave of interest in early modern encounters
with Ottoman “Turks” and the religion of Islam, The Renegado
has attracted a burst of critical attention. Following the publication
of Daniel Vitkus’s modern edition (2000), critics including Bindu
Malieckal, Barbara Fuchs, Jonathan Gil Harris, Jonathan Burton,
Valerie Forman, and Vitkus himself have explored the play’s dramati-
zation of contemporary anxieties about Mediterranean commerce and
English contact with the Ottoman empire.1 Earlier critical interest in the
play was sparse and tended to address the Catholic elements of the play,
generally understood to be a function of Massinger’s (possible) crypto-
Catholicism or, at least, his religious tolerance.2 Although this former
interest in the play’s Catholic leanings may seem worlds apart from the
present critical interest in “Turk” plays, my intention here is to show
how the subjects of these two disparate critical approaches are in fact
directly interrelated. Specifically, I argue that the play’s unlikely invest-
ment in Catholic rituals, objects, and bodily practices is directly related
to its central concern with the threat of Islamic conversion. Registering
an anxiety about the dematerialized, spiritual emphasis of Protestant
faith, The Renegado turns to more tangible and embodied models
of Catholic resistance in order to imagine a viable Christian defense
against the particular threat of turning Turk. In addition, the play relies
upon the outward, ceremonial emphasis of the sacraments in order
to negotiate a means of redemption for select individuals who have
previously fallen under the sway of Islam.
Set in the cross-cultural port city of Tunis, a tributary of the
Ottoman empire, the play presents two central Christian protagonists,
a brother and sister, who both risk sexual defilement and subsequent
conversion as the result of threatened unions with Muslim charac-
ters. It also dramatizes the plight of a renegade pirate who has previ-
ously denounced Christianity and now seeks repentance. While in this
play conversion to Islam is mediated across a slippery threshold, both
physical and spiritual, it implies a transgression from which there seems
to be no return. And yet, despite the tragic repercussions linked with
Islamic conversion – its association with permanent and irreversible
consequences – The Renegado produces a comic ending for each of
its Christian protagonists. These comic resolutions, however, turn out
to be contingent upon the efficacy of a surprising model of Christian
faith and resistance, and reveal a logic of redemption that differs for
men and women. Although The Renegado overtly posits the triumph
of Christian spirituality over Islamic carnality, it anchors Christian
resistance in Catholic objects, ceremonies, and bodily practices, and
repeatedly marks spiritual redemption in outward, visible, and mate-
rial ways. For example, a “relic” purported to have magical qualities
successfully protects the Christian heroine’s virginity from her Turkish
captor’s carnal designs (1.1.147; 2.5.162).3 Similarly, the renegade
pirate assures his readmission to the church by making his confession
to a Jesuit priest – a most unlikely hero on the English Renaissance
stage – who is dressed “in a cope, like a bishop” (4.1.72).4 Enacting
the ritual stages of confession and penance, the renegade reverses his
Engendering Faith 123
former act of apostasy, which was carried out through his disruption of
a Catholic mass and desecration of the Eucharistic host. And the play
extends Christian conversion to the Muslim princess by requiring her
participation in an elaborate baptism ceremony that is performed by a
layman, her husband-to-be.
These details position the play explicitly against the practices and
beliefs of English Protestantism, and yet the play was given official
license for public performance and appears to have been popular and
uncontroversial in its time. I want to suggest that The Renegado’s
depiction of Christian triumph over Muslim conversion involves a
complex negotiation of spiritual and material models of faith that
suggests a merging of Protestant and Catholic models. In turn, these
tensions between spirituality and materiality reveal the ways in which
Islam’s threat to early modern England was perceived to be not just
“religious” in nature, but bodily as well. More specifically, the play’s
recourse to material, Catholic practices to resist or undo Islamic con-
version reveals how Islam was perceived to be a sexual threat, how
it was understood to involve a bodily conversion, and how this con-
version suggested potential racial implications. It is partly because of
Islam’s perceived sexual and bodily threat to Christians, I argue, that
the stage resurrected older, Catholic models of Christian resistance that
were distinctly tangible and embodied.
Importantly, in mounting a Christian defense against turning Turk,
The Renegado does not merely replace spiritualized understandings
of faith with material forms, but rather presents an active tension
between the two that is mediated through gender. More specifically,
while spiritual fortitude might be enough to ward off the conver-
sion of the Christian hero of the play, the Christian heroine relies
for her protection on the outward, material aid of a relic, which in
turn safeguards her bodily chastity from the sexual persecutions of a
lustful Turk. And while the sexual seduction of the Christian hero by
a Turkish woman is reversible, the same is not true for the Christian
heroine. Her spiritual status, unlike the Christian hero’s, is indivisible
from that of her body, and the threatened destruction of her chastity
by the Turkish viceroy suggests a permanent and complete undoing
of her Christian identity. Thus, the play’s insistence upon the need
for outward objects and bodily practices to supplement spiritual faith
is partly dependent upon the reinforcement of certain gender stere-
otypes. What is more, these gendered distinctions are bound up with
anxieties about embodied and reproductive contamination. Fair skin
underscores the Christian heroine’s vulnerability to Islamic conver-
sion, as well as the Muslim heroine’s eligibility for Christianity. Thus,
as Mary Janell Metzger observed of the distinctions between Jessica
and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the intersecting logics of
gender, religious difference, and whiteness help dictate the terms of
conversion.5 As I have suggested in previous chapters, the stage’s
propensity to represent the threat of Islam as a threat of conversion
facilitated through sexual intercourse suggests its translation of the
religious, commercial, and imperial threat of the Ottoman empire
into a personal, bodily threat with proto-racial implications.6 Within
this framework, the Christian heroine’s pronounced vulnerability to
irrevocable sexual contamination reflects a patriarchal logic that rein-
scribes her under her male sexual partner and highlights her reproduc-
tive role in perpetuating his seed.
Domestic Religious Context
Given the April 1624 licensing of The Renegado in the wake of a fierce
resurgence of anti-Catholic polemic prompted by royal negotiations
for a Spanish match the previous year, and just four months prior to
Thomas Middleton’s blatantly anti-Catholic A Game at Chess, it is
certainly remarkable that The Renegado should not only escape censure
but enjoy considerable popularity and success. It is just this degree
of unlikelihood that I want to capture and emphasize, however. The
Renegado continued to be performed throughout the 1620s until its
publication in 1630, and its debut at the Cockpit associated it with
one of the most prestigious and lucrative playhouses in London. Such
popular success suggests a softening of Protestant attitudes toward
Catholicism that has not typically been associated with the early-
to-mid-1620s. Critics dating back to William Gifford in 1805 have
attempted to explain the play’s Catholic elements by speculating that
Massinger was himself a crypto-Catholic or by attributing them to
Spanish sources.7 Rather, I suggest that what appear to us as the play’s
clear Catholic affinities point to a broader, popular sensibility that
still relied on Catholic models for conceiving of faith and resistance to
persecution. Moreover, The Renegado reveals ways in which popular
English attitudes toward Catholic and Protestant religious practices
were influenced by the seemingly unrelated activity of commercial
intercourse with the Ottoman empire. By adopting Catholic models
to confront the threat of Islamic conversion, Massinger refunctions
these models as acceptable forms of Christian resistance in a culture
transformed not only by the Reformation but by increased commercial
contact with Muslims.
The real and imagined fear of turning Turk may not only have pres-
sured a return to Catholic models, but also helped to lay the cultural
groundwork for the Church of England’s gradual shift away from
Calvinism in favor of the more sensuous, ceremonial forms of worship
associated with William Laud and Arminianism. In carrying out the
conversion of the Muslim princess and the redemption of the renegade
pirate, The Renegado exaggerates the ceremonial elements involved
in the sacraments of baptism and reconciliation. As Michael Neill has
recently argued, these doctrinal shifts associated with the Arminian
ascendancy lent themselves to the “conventional ‘turn and counterturn’
of tragicomic design.”8 In this way, he links The Renegado’s doctri-
nal stance to the rise of the tragicomic form. By contrast, Benedict
Robinson has sought to explain the play’s apparent Arminian sym-
pathies by privileging its publication date of 1630 over its earlier per-
formance date of 1624 and placing it in the context of Laudian politics
and Caroline drama.9 I share Neill’s sense that the redemptive arc of
the play relies on a doctrinal logic that seems sympathetic to both
Catholicism and Arminianism, and I am in accord with Robinson’s
impulse to consider the play’s Christian-Muslim opposition in relation
to domestic religious factions. In contrast to these critics, however, I
link the play’s Catholic and proto-Arminian sympathies in 1624 to the
embodied and sexualized threat of turning Turk. Because this threat of
conversion exceeded the realm of spiritual faith, it demanded physical
and material countermeasures in order to believably enact its resist-
ance or reversal. In crucial ways, both the embodied emphasis of Islam
and its tangible Christian countermeasures are also encouraged by the
visual and theatrical orientation of the public stage.
The Renegado’s hypothesis that a male Christian might be able to
reverse the contaminating effects of sexual intercourse with a Muslim
woman through spiritual fortitude marks a sharp departure from
previous dramas in which any contact with a Turk was potentially a
prelude to permanent conversion. As recent critics have shown, The
Renegado is one of numerous plays performed in London between
1580 and 1630 that stage cross-cultural encounters between Christians
and Muslims set in the unstable trading territories of the southeastern
Mediterranean. As Jean Howard has noted, these adventure dramas
typically feature swashbuckling Christian heroes who, through contact
with foreign cultures and people, undergo an “actual or threatened
transformation . . . into something alien.”10 Most notably, Robert
Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610) provides an important
precedent for Massinger’s play. As detailed in my Introduction, in
Daborne’s play the sexual seduction of a Christian hero by a Muslim
woman leads to immediate Islamic conversion and irrevocable damna-
tion.11 Daborne’s particular yoking of conversion and sexual seduction
implied a transformation that was generated through the body and
permanent. Further, in interpreting the hero’s sexual transgression and
subsequent conversion as signs of his unalterable path to damnation,
the play follows a tragic arc that is consistent with Calvinist predestina-
tion.12 It is this precedent that The Renegado clearly sets out to revise. As
Vitkus points out, The Renegado seems to “consciously” rewrite the
plot of A Christian Turned Turke, transforming a tragic ending into
a comic one.13 More specifically, whereas A Christian Turned Turke
cannot imagine a way to resolve Ward’s sexual defilement other than
through permanent conversion and damnation, The Renegado dis-
rupts the immediate equation by positing that the sins of the body do
not necessarily have to damn the soul. Thus, if in Daborne’s play the
sexual union between Christian protagonist and Muslim woman leads
inevitably to the Christian man’s religious conversion, suicide, and
damnation, in The Renegado the Christian-Muslim union can lead to
repentance, baptism, and marriage. The earlier play’s representation of
its Christian hero’s irreversible conversion helps us to appreciate the
stakes of the intervention that The Renegado seeks to make and why it
must rely on visual, material indexes of faith in order to mark Christian
redemption.
Commerce, Sex, and Fungibility
It is fitting that the Christian hero’s seduction by the Muslim prin-

cess begins in the Tunisian marketplace, where the purchase and
sale of commodities constitutes an analogy for religious and bodily
conversion. The play’s alignment of commodity exchange and reli-
gious conversion emphasizes both the fungibility of human bodies
and souls and their potential resistance to fungible or anonymous
exchange. As Nabil Matar and others have shown, the historical condi-
tions of Mediterranean trade provided an important context for early
seventeenth-century dramas of cross-cultural contact and conver-
sion.14 The Ottoman empire’s control over the majority of southeastern
Mediterranean ports and trade routes meant that the English were com-
pletely at its mercy for obtaining the luxury goods that their re-export
economy increasingly depended upon. While piracy and the captivity of
English seamen had also been problems during Queen Elizabeth’s reign,
they became especially pressing concerns under King James.15 English
seamen operating in the Mediterranean were perceived to be constantly
vulnerable to piracy, enslavement, and religious conversion, especially
along the Barbary Coast, where privateers of many different nation-
alities competed for commodities – both nonhuman and human. Like
Daborne’s play before it, The Renegado translates this real-life threat of
captivity and conversion into a drama of sexual seduction.
Disguised as a merchant, Vitelli, a Venetian gentleman, has set up
shop in the Tunisian marketplace in order to attempt to rescue his
sister, Paulina, who has been sold into Turkish captivity by the epony-
mous “renegade” pirate, Grimaldi. While Paulina is imprisoned in
the Ottoman palace and struggles daily to protect her virtue from the
Turkish viceroy, Vitelli is diverted by his own seduction by the Turkish
princess Donusa. When, in the third scene of the play, Donusa pays a
visit to Vitelli’s shop in the market, she peruses his wares as he in turn
examines her. Though she poses as a buyer and he as a seller, it is not
at all clear what or who is being bought or sold. When Donusa asks
to be shown “the chiefest of [Vitelli’s] wares” (1.3.105), Vitelli hands
her a looking glass “steeled so exactly, neither taking from / Nor flat-
tering the object it returns / To the beholder, that Narcissus might /
. . . view his fair feature in it” (1.3.109–13). In this way, Vitelli succeeds
in “steeling” Donusa’s reflection, converting her image into a saleable
commodity in his possession. One might note that the opening scene
has previously established Vitelli’s large stock of portraits of European
princesses, which were actually modeled by “bawds and common
courtesans in Venice” (1.1.13). The image of Donusa’s face in Vitelli’s
mirror thus aligns her with these “bawds” and “courtesans” and
their commodified sexuality. But Donusa destabilizes Vitelli’s implied
mastery over his wares and her sexuality when she suddenly “unveils
herself” and seizes him with “wonder” (1.3.140–1). Donusa then pur-
posely breaks some of his glass wares; no longer a captive image in his
mirror, she takes control of the transaction by bidding him to “bring
his bill / Tomorrow to the palace and enquire / For one ‘Donusa’ . . . /
Say there he shall receive / Full satisfaction” (1.3.156–60). Donusa thus
succeeds in turning the tables on Vitelli, for in transposing the payment
of the debt to her turf, she shifts the power dynamic between buyer and
seller, and makes the Christian gentleman’s chastity, rather than her
own, the one at risk.
The relocation from the marketplace to Donusa’s chambers removes
the transaction from the site of commercial exchange to a private space,
making clear that what is at stake is Vitelli’s bodily virtue and not his
damaged “wares” (1.3.105). When she returns to the palace, Donusa is
teased for her interest in Vitelli by her castrated serving man, Carazie,
and her female servant, Manto. The eunuch’s astonishment at Donusa’s
susceptibility to such a meager “haberdasher of small wares” (2.3.4) and
Manto’s mocking reminder that Carazie himself “hast none” (2.3.5)
drive home the message of what Vitelli stands to lose in the transac-
tion. That Carazie, the only English character in the play, is a Muslim
convert and a castrated servant in the Ottoman palace makes anxious
humor of the common conflation of conversion with circumcision
and castration.16 When Vitelli arrives at the heavily protected palace,
he slowly penetrates its outer layers to reach Donusa’s inner private
chamber. Donusa offers him compensation for the “poor petty trifles”
(2.4.81) she has “injured” (2.4.80) in the form of “bags stuffed full of
our imperial coin” (2.4.83), “gems for which the slavish Indian dives”
(2.4.85), and finally sexual intercourse, which she describes as “the
tender of / Myself” (2.4.101–2). Both the overpayment of her debt and
the uneasy slippage between objects of exchange and her selfhood (or
sexuality) reflect a crisis of value that lies at the heart of the play. While,
on one hand, The Renegado asserts that human souls and bodies are as
fungible as commodities, it simultaneously resists this analogy through
its emphasis on the deep and permanent effects of bodily transgressions
and their potential to outweigh the power of the spirit.
Although Donusa’s trading of “the tender of [her]self” in exchange
for “poor petty trifles” implies that she is the loser in the bargain,
Vitelli’s acceptance of the offer seems to threaten a loss that is even
greater. His capitulation to Donusa signals the overpowering of his
Christian soul by his bodily desires, a defeat that in turn presumes
potential spiritual consequences. Vitelli resists Donusa’s offers of money
and gems, but finds himself powerless against her sexual charms:
How I shake
In my constant resolution! And my flesh,
Rebellious to my better part, now tells me
(As if it were a strong defense of frailty)
A hermit in a desert trenched with prayers
Could not resist this battery. (2.4.108–13)
Vitelli’s sense of his “flesh” outmatching the “constant resolution” of
his “better part” illustrates the serious infraction of having sex with a
Muslim woman and how it was imagined to conflate a bodily trans-
gression with a spiritual one. Vitelli’s sexual union with Donusa results
in a superficial transformation of his appearance, including a new set of
fine clothing, but it also suggests the potential for deeper and more per-
manent effects. Led by Donusa to the innermost chamber of the palace,
“some private room the sunbeams never enter” (2.4.130), Vitelli agrees
to relinquish his virginity, exclaiming, “Though the Devil / Stood by
and roared, I follow!” (2.4.134–5). His equation of a Muslim woman
with “the Devil” suggests a union that will lead him down the path
to conversion and thus eternal damnation, setting him up for a fate
matching that of the protagonist from Daborne’s A Christian Turned
Turke.
In drawing a causal link between sexual intercourse between a
Christian and a Turk and conversion to Islam, plays such as The
Renegado and A Christian Turned Turke suggest an essential, embod-
ied difference between “Christian” and “Turk” that did not apply in the
same way to Catholics and Protestants. While Protestant polemic linked
Catholicism to the biblical Whore of Babylon in order to denigrate the
practice of idolatry, this sexual allusion was primarily understood as
allegorical in nature.17 By contrast, Muslims were associated with a
literal threat of sexual and bodily contamination. John Stradling marks
this distinction between Catholics and Muslims in his 1623 poem Beati
Pacifici.18 Anticipating an objection to his advocacy of a Protestant–
Catholic alliance against the Turk, he imagines that someone will hold
up the example of Phineas, who fervently slaughtered an Israelite man
and Moabite woman as they engaged in sexual intercourse. Rejecting
the possible analogy between Catholic and Moabite, Stradling offered
the simple response, “Here be no Moabites.”19 In other words, he
implies that whereas Catholics were not comparable to the essential
difference of the Moabite woman, the Turks were.
Jesuitical Intercession
Indeed, Vitelli’s de-virgination by Donusa seems at first to consign

him to the same damning fate as Daborne’s hero. Wearing a new
set of “fine clothes” offered by Donusa, he is met on the street by
Francisco, a Jesuit priest who seems to be stationed in Tunis to provide
counsel to the Christians, and by Vitelli’s servant, Gazet.20 Francisco
alludes to Vitelli’s new clothes by remarking that he is “strangely
metamorphosed” (2.6.20), and adds, “You have made, sir, / A pros-
perous voyage. Heaven grant it be honest: / I shall rejoice it then,
too” (2.6.20–2). Vitelli makes overtures toward sharing his gold and
attempts to justify his new wealth by suggesting that it can be used to
redeem Christian captives from Turkish galleys. But Francisco asserts
that the sinful source of Vitelli’s wealth invalidates the good it can do
and suggests that it may have implications for his soul that exceed
the outer transformation of his appearance. He exclaims, “They steer
not the right course, nor traffic well, / That seek a passage to reach
heaven through hell” (2.6.45–6). Thus, he implies that in accepting
Figure 3.1: Jesuit priests, from Thomas Scott, The second part of Vox populi (London,
1624), G4v. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Donusa’s gifts, Vitelli has chosen a sensuous course that cannot lead to
salvation.
Importantly, however, The Renegado allows for Vitelli to redeem
himself and stave off damnation through Francisco’s intercession. That
Massinger not only portrays this Jesuit priest in a positive light but
credits him with the salvation of the Christian characters, their escape
from Tunis, and the happy outcome of the play is remarkable given
the usual vilification of Jesuits in Protestant England. In fact, there
was an outpouring of anti-Jesuit tracts the year after The Renegado’s
initial performance, associating Jesuit priests with conniving methods
of infiltration and conversion, assassination plans, and covert Catholic
rebellions.21 By contrast, The Renegado marks Francisco as a hero for
advocating equivocation as a means to subvert the Turks (5.2.35–7),
and for masterminding a covert plan at the end of the play to facilitate
the escape of the Christian characters. The play’s happy conclusion
depends upon the priest’s crafty intercession. In other words, whereas
Jesuitical practices were never condoned by the English when used
against Protestants, they are condoned in the play for use against
Muslims. In addition, the play relies on the Jesuit to counsel and redeem
its errant Christian characters, and to lend authority and validation to
their inward contrition. After exiting the stage to converse privately
with Francisco, Vitelli returns convinced of the error of his ways and
resolute in his conviction to redeem himself through future acts.
Notably, the Christian protagonist’s sexual transgression has not,
as in the case of Daborne’s protagonist, occasioned a circumci-
sion. Despite Gazet and Carazie’s jokes to this effect, Vitelli emerges
from the palace with his foreskin and his testicles intact, and perhaps
this helps to account for why his redemption is more easily posited than
Ward’s. Although the threat of circumcision, and by extension castra-
tion, hovers around the edges of this play, its disconnection from the
act of sexual intercourse enables Vitelli to emerge from sex unscathed
in a way that his sister Paulina might not. Certainly, what Burton char-
acterizes as the play’s comedic disavowal of circumcision and castration
mask genuine anxieties about these interrelated threats.22 Their signifi-
cance in relation to the play’s mercantile context has attracted numer-
ous critics. As Fuchs, Harris, and most recently Forman have observed,
The Renegado’s portrayal of Carazie and the threat of castration
expresses fears of English emasculation in the face of Mediterranean
piracy, economic loss, and the disruption of trade.23 In my own reading,
the dramatized threats of circumcision and castration function not as
allegories for economic anxieties, but as examples of how conversion to
Islam assumed an embodied significance in the early modern imagina-
tion (though economic and bodily anxieties were also interrelated). As
an indelible mark upon the body, circumcision suggested a physical sign
of the irreversibility of conversion as well as the convert’s relegation to
a proto-racial category that distinguished both Muslims and Jews from
Christians. Thus on the stage, the significance of circumcision – its
theological, covenantal, and communitarian role in the Jewish tradition
– was largely recast as a mark of exclusion rather than a signature
of covenantal membership that builds communities across time and
space. In addition, the stage’s comic association of circumcision with
the more drastic cut of castration conflated the ritualized ceremony
of brit milah with the castrated eunuchs identified with the sultan’s
seraglio. This conflation also projected the threat of circumcision into
more extreme and drastic bodily consequences. In Daborne’s play,
circumcision is closely linked to the sexual transgression that prompts
the protagonist’s conversion in that it immediately follows his sexual
interlude with a Turkish woman. Thus, the fact that Vitelli eludes
circumcision is all the more significant. It is precisely by avoiding this
consequence that the play seems to acknowledge the role of circumci-
sion in sealing conversion, marking it as a fait accompli. By disrupting
the association between sexual transgression and circumcision, The
Renegado sustains the possibility that Vitelli’s sexual transgression has
not yet converted his body and thus can be reversed through spiritual
cleansing.
Male Spiritual Redemption and Female Bodily Resistance
Vitelli’s return to the palace enables a palimpsestic rewriting of his

previous bodily transgression as a triumph of spiritual resistance. After
seeking counsel from Francisco, Vitelli returns to announce his repu-
diation of Islam and to bear the trial of Donusa’s repeated attempts
to seduce and convert him. At first he refuses even to look at Donusa
because he fears he will be unable to resist her embraces, even if “iron
grates were interposed between [them]” (3.5.10). His worry that his
“human frailty” might “betray” him “in scorn of reason, and what’s
more, religion” and his allusion to the “overvalue” at which he has
“purchased” Donusa’s body suggest a close correspondence between
sexual transgression and religious consequences (3.5.12, 16, 15, 41). In
fact, Vitelli ultimately decides to look upon Donusa, convinced that
“The trial, else, is nothing; nor the conquest . . . / Worthy to be remem-
bered” (3.5.35, 37). Crying, “Up, my virtue! / And holy thoughts and
resolutions arm me / Against this fierce temptation!” (3.5.37–9), he
enlists his spiritual “resolutions” against Donusa’s physical tempta-
tions. After avowing his firm allegiance to Christianity, he returns the
“casket” of jewels and “cloak and doublet” she has given him (3.5.48,
50). In shedding his rich “livery” (3.5.50), Vitelli draws attention to a
distinction between the ease of shedding the external trappings of his
corporeal sin and the difficulty of redeeming his inward “innocence”
(3.5.45):
That I could with that ease

Redeem my forfeit innocence or cast up
The poison I received into my entrails
From the alluring cup of your enticements
As now I do deliver back the price Returns the casket
And salary of your lust! Or thus unclothe me
Of sin’s gay trappings, the proud livery Throws off his cloak and
doublet
Of wicked pleasure. (3.5.44–51)
Vitelli’s manner of comparing the spiritual redemption he desires to
“cast[ing] up / The poison I received into my entrails / From the allur-
ing cup of your enticements” seems to reflect a struggle to characterize
inner redemption in terms that differ from the outward casting off of
Donusa’s “livery.” Both dialogue and stage directions capture a tension
between outward bodily action (Vitelli’s “throwing off his cloak and
doublet” and “returning the casket of jewels”; the sexual double enten-
dre of Donusa’s “alluring cup”) and the attainment of inner purifica-
tion. Although the play resorts to a bodily metaphor, it suggests in the
end that Vitelli’s desire to “redeem [his] forfeit innocence” has little
to do with the body at all, and everything to do with transcendent
spiritual redemption.
But if inner contrition can save Vitelli, the same latitude is not
extended to his sister, the Christian heroine. Instead, the play vigilantly
protects her bodily integrity. Although Paulina is fiercely pursued by
the viceroy of Tunis, who holds her captive in the same palace where
Vitelli succumbs to Donusa, the play simply will not allow a sexual
union to take place between the Christian heroine and a Turkish
man. That Paulina’s spiritual constancy must be supplemented by her
physical virginity reflects the limit of the play’s own faith in the efficacy
of inner faith as a countermeasure to Islamic conversion. Conjuring St.
Paul’s spiritualized universalism through her very name, Paulina dem-
onstrates how this notion of faith does not adequately anchor female
Christian identity in the contemporary cross-currents of Ottoman
North Africa. Rather, the physical body is called into play. Despite
Protestant England’s general repudiation of vowed female celibacy, it is
here construed as a necessary corollary to inner constancy. In this way,
the chaste and miraculously inviolable Paulina follows the template of
the virgin martyrs of medieval Catholic saints’ tales, whose resistance to
rape is celebrated in the martyr plays of my previous chapter.
Paulina’s Holy Relic
What is more, the play externalizes Paulina’s virginity by means of a

holy relic that she wears upon her breast, thereby employing a Catholic
idol – one of the chief targets of Protestant iconoclasm – as a viable and
necessary protector of the Christian faith.24 Francisco reassures Vitelli
that his sister’s chastity is protected:
I oft have told you
Of a relic that I gave her which has power,
If we may credit holy men’s traditions,
To keep the owner free from violence.
This on her breast she wears and does preserve
The virtue of it by her daily prayers. (1.1.146–51)
Contrary to Francisco’s credible association with the relic, publica-

tions such as Jean de Chassanion’s The merchandises of popish priests
(1629) perpetuated a demonized association between Jesuit priests
and the importation of relics in England. Subtitled “A discouery of
the Jesuites trumpery newly packed in England. Laying open to the
world, how cunningly they cheate and abuse poore people, with their
false, deceitfull, and counterfet wares,” De Chassanion’s text sought
to expose a link between Jesuit priests’ use of relics and their deceitful
practices (see Figure 3.2).
Nevertheless, The Renegado reaffirms Francisco’s testimony to the
protective “power” of Paulina’s relic through its effects on the Turkish
viceroy. When confronted with it, Asambeg’s predatory lust turns to
softness and restraint: “Ravish her, I dare not,” he says, “The magic
that she wears about her neck, / I think, defends her” (2.5.161–3). Part
of the irony of Asambeg’s validation of the relic’s talismanic qualities
lies in the fact that Islam condemned the practice of idolatry just as vehe-
mently as Protestantism did. Although some English Protestants were
beginning to re-embrace sacramental and sensuous worship as early as
the 1620s, relics were still considered far beyond the pale. Furthermore,
the play’s association of the relic with a virtuous Catholic virgin goes
directly against Protestants’ traditional association of idolatry with
Catholic whoredom. As Frances Dolan has argued, the tendency for
Catholic women to worship false idols, or to assign talismanic powers
to “trinkets and toys,” was understood to derive from their ignorance,
vanity, and superstition.25 Thus, the play purposefully interferes with
Protestant assumptions about women’s abuse of relics in order to asso-
ciate a Catholic woman’s use of a relic with the integrity of her virtue.
On some level, the sacred relic that protects Paulina’s chastity
functions as an outward manifestation of her virginal hymen. Thus,
it demonstrates the play’s conflation of religious protection against
conversion with a sexual chastity that is literally figured through
the body. In addition to externalizing religious resistance, the relic’s
promise of inviolability assuages anxieties about the inherent intangi-
bility of the hymen, which despite its material tangibility is located on
the inside of the body and is thus impossible to see from the outside. In
fact, as medical discourses from the period point out, verification
Figure 3.2: Jean de Chassanion, Merchandises of popish priests (London: 1629),

title page woodcut. Reproduced by permission of the Faculty of Advocates and the
Abbotsford Library Project.
Figure 3.3: Detail of the virginal hymen, from Thomas Bartholin, Bartholinus
anatomy (London, 1668), 76, plate V. Reproduced by permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library.
of the hymen’s status is complicated by the fact that intactness can

only be proven through penetration.26 This problem of verification is
directly alluded to in a conversation between the Muslim princess and
her servant Manto, when Donusa worries that her loss of virginity to
Vitelli might be visible from the outside. After learning that Manto is
also no longer a virgin, Donusa asks her, “Could thy friends / Read
in thy face, thy maidenhead gone, that thou / Hadst parted with it?”
(3.1.12–14). Her use of the term “maidenhead” itself captures a certain
slippage between abstraction and materiality, in that the term referred
interchangeably in the early seventeenth century to “the state or
condition of virginity” as well as the physical “hymen.”27 And indeed,
Manto replies that she successfully “passed / for current many years
after” without the truth being discovered (3.1.14–15).28
The utility of the relic as physical evidence of Paulina’s virginity
responds to the play’s urgency around ensuring her intact hymen. Of
course, the use of a relic as sexual prophylactic may not have offered
Figure 3.4: Catholic objects weighed against the Protestant Word, from Thomas
Williamson, The sword of the spirit to smite in pieces that antichristian Goliah
(London, 1613), sig. B3r. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.
complete reassurance. For one thing, English audiences in 1624 could

not have viewed the portrayal of an efficacious relic without also
remaining aware of Protestant reformers’ rejection of the notion that
mere objects might possess sacred powers. As critics such as Arjun
Appadurai and Harris remind us, material objects cannot be divorced
from the meanings they accrue through their social histories and their
circulation within systems of economic exchange.29 Relics represent a
particularly interesting kind of materiality in that their value lies in their
perceived singularity and sacred presence, and yet they were imminently
subject to commodification and forged reproduction. Thus, given their
status in post-Reformation England as fakes and commodities, such
relics may seem to resemble the unverifiable nature of the hymen and
the potential commodification of female sexuality. In that it is nomi-
nally sealed off from circulation, Paulina’s amulet is at once expressly
distinct from the fungible goods of the market scene, as well as the
despotic economy of the seraglio, while also suggestive of the potential
for commodification. At the same time, I would locate the relic’s utility
not merely in its “materiality,” whose meaning could not be separated
from its social history, but in its concrete physicality, which serves to
anchor Paulina’s uncompromised virginity and to reinforce the audi-
ence’s faith in its protection. Quite crudely, Paulina’s confrontation
with a threat of conversion that is specifically sexualized and embodied
in nature calls for a physical defense system.
Baptism as Spiritual Re-Virgination
Whereas Paulina’s virginity is construed to be completely inflexible

and, if compromised, irreparable, the Turkish Donusa’s loss of virginity
is rendered distinct from her potential to possess inner virtue – a virtue
that is instead dependent upon her conversion to Christianity. Clearly,
the political advantages of Donusa’s marriage to Vitelli play a role in
this. However, the play’s eagerness to produce some outward assurance
of Donusa’s Christian conversion, as well as of her repaired virtue, is not
without anxiety. Just as Paulina relies on a relic to stabilize her virginity
and by extension her Christian identity, Donusa requests an outward
assurance of her faith and redemption that will spiritually reseal her
hymen and mark her Christian conversion. When asked whether she is
“confirmed” (4.3.154) in her Christian faith, she responds, “I would
be – but the means / That may assure me?” (4.3.154–5). This prompts
Vitelli to seek from the Jesuit priest
The holy badge that should proclaim her fit

For these celestial nuptials. Willing she is,
I know, to wear it as the choicest jewel
On her fair forehead. (5.1.23–6)
In this way, both Donusa’s religious conversion and her spiritual re-
virgination are externalized in the form of a “holy badge” worn upon
the “forehead.” Like Paulina’s relic, Donusa’s “holy badge” functions
on some level as an outer corollary to her hymen – rendering evidence of
its spiritual reconstitution. Yet this object also resists materialization in
that it does not constitute an actual badge, but is an imagined “jewel,”
worn as a sign of her mind’s purification. And unlike Paulina, Donusa
is not an actual virgin, but rather a spiritually born-again virgin. Given
the play’s unyielding commitment to maintaining Paulina’s unbreak-
able chastity, its willingness to Christianize and render marriageable a
de-virginated Muslim woman is certainly remarkable. This willingness
seems to suggest that the racial implication of converting a Muslim
princess to Christianity by coupling her with a Christian husband was
far less threatening than the possibility of a Christian woman’s conver-
sion to Islam.30 Donusa’s marriage also serves the purpose of rescu-
ing her from a match with Mustapha, the Muslim basha of Aleppo,
who has come to Tunis to woo her – signaling a victory for Christian
masculinity.31
But in order to carry out the miraculous conversion of Donusa, to
redeem her from her sexual transgression and render her marriageable
to a Christian man, The Renegado must invest tremendous author-
ity in the saving powers of baptism. The “holy badge” that Vitelli
requests refers most directly to the sacrament of baptism, a sacrament
that was a source of intense debate in the years leading up to Laud’s
ascendancy. Whereas most Calvinists held baptism to be a symbolic
act that could not override predestination, Catholics and later fol-
lowers of Laud and Jacobus Arminius put real stock in the magic of
the ceremony.32 Vitelli’s request to perform a lay baptism of Donusa
would have been perceived as validation of baptism’s mystical powers
and its necessity for salvation – an interpretation that was distinctly
anti-Calvinist. Vitelli says of the water he throws on her face, “It hath
power / To purge those spots that cleave upon the mind” (5.3.114–
15). Similarly, Donusa’s reaction to the baptism affirms its transforma-
tive powers. After Vitelli “throws [water] on her face” (5.3.116), she
responds,
I am another woman – til this minute
I never lived, nor durst think how to die.
How long have I been blind! Yet on the sudden
By this blest means I feel the films of error
Ta’en from my soul’s eyes. (5.3.121–5)
Donusa’s baptism marks a triumph of spirit over body, for the symbolic
cleansing of the “spots that cleave upon [her] mind” seems to render
the physical defilement of her body inconsequential. Her spontaneous
announcement upon having water thrown on her face (“I am another
woman”), followed by her Pauline reference to gaining the miracle
of sight, characterize her conversion as instantaneous, complete, and
miraculous.33 While, as I briefly consider in the concluding section of
this chapter, the self-conscious performativity of this moment reminds
us that we are watching a play and not a miracle, the Muslim woman’s
conversion to Christianity within the fiction of the play not only author-
izes but depends upon the ceremonial accoutrements of baptism.
In addition to depicting Donusa’s baptism as a magical transfor-
mation, The Renegado explicitly cites a contemporary debate about
lay baptism. Reasoning that it would not be possible for Francisco to
gain access to the palace prison in order to perform Donusa’s baptism,
Vitelli asks, “Whether, in me, a layman, without orders, / It may not
be religious and lawful, / As we go to our deaths, to do that office?”
(5.1.30–2). Beginning in the later sixteenth century, Presbyterian
reformers such as Thomas Cartwright made clear their position that
lay baptism was an unequivocally Catholic practice that needed to be
abolished.34 Francisco’s reply authorizes Vitelli to perform Donusa’s
baptism by citing the authority granted to midwives to perform emer-
gency baptisms on dying newborns, as well as that granted to Christian
soldiers in the Crusades who performed baptisms on the battlefield:
A question in itself with much ease answered:
Midwives, upon necessity, perform it;
And knights that in the Holy Land fought for
The freedom of Jerusalem, when full
Of sweat and enemies’ blood, have made their helmets
The fount out of which with their holy hands
They drew that heavenly liquor. ’Twas approved then
By the holy church, nor must I think it now,
In you, a work less pious. (5.1.33–41)
Francisco’s appeal to both “midwives” and crusading “knights” evokes

Catholic precedent to justify the performance of lay baptism. While the
established church did not forbid midwives from baptizing newborns,
radical reformers tended to object to female participation in church rites
because they viewed it as a Catholic holdover.35 In addition, Francisco’s
allusion to the “knights that in the Holy Land fought for / The freedom
of Jerusalem” draws attention to the common Christian history that is
shared by Protestants and Catholics alike – a time in the past when the
“holy church” denoted a single, unified entity. Drawn from Torquato
Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581), Francisco’s reference to “sweat”-
and “blood”-filled “helmets” used as baptismal “founts” links Vitelli’s
baptism of Donusa to Tancredi’s baptism of Clorinda, and to a previ-
ous Christian collaboration prompted by the religious and imperial
threat of Islam.36 Specifically, he alludes to the Holy Crusades in which
the nations of western Europe united to wrest the Holy Land from
Muslim control. Historically, the English fully supported the religious
and military crusade that was exemplified by the pan-European Knights
Hospitallers of Jerusalem, later called the Knights of Malta, a religious
order under the jurisdiction of the pope. In 1540, however, Henry VIII
dissolved the English langue (or branch) of the Knights of Malta by
parliamentary statute, causing many Knights to be executed or forced
into exile.37 The Renegado’s valorization of the Knights reinvokes
the Christian Crusades to draw an analogy with the current neces-
sity of converting the Muslim princess. As I explore in the following
chapter, the unlikely reappearance of the Knights of Malta in five post-
Reformation stage plays similarly illustrates the renewed relevance of
medieval Catholic models to help frame the current Christian-Muslim
conflict.
Ecumenical Politics and the Role of the Popular Stage
Indeed, the appeal of a pan-Christian alliance against the Ottoman

empire may provide a partial explanation for the apparent Catholic
sympathies of Massinger’s play because it offers a political context
for religious concessions toward Catholicism. At the same time that
Ottoman piracy posed an increasing threat to Christian seamen oper-
ating in the Mediterranean, England’s attitude toward its traditional
Catholic arch-enemy, Spain, was in a state of transition. England’s
relationships to Catholic Spain and the Ottoman empire were in fact
directly interrelated in the period. King James’s negotiations for a
Spanish match were ostensibly aimed at securing Spanish assistance in
returning the Palatinate to his son-in-law, Frederick V, but James also
hoped that the match would facilitate general Christian pacification
and a league against the Turk. For example, in 1620 James organ-
ized an Anglo-Spanish attack on Algiers, the capital of North Africa’s
Ottoman regencies, which, as Malieckal has suggested, may have pro-
vided the historical impetus for Massinger’s play.38 Thus, “Protestant,”
“Catholic,” and “Turk” were linked together in a triangular relationship
in which two sides were allied against the third.
King James’s endorsement of a pan-Christian alliance was shared
by a number of English clergy who operated under his patronage and
espoused the rhetoric of Christian unity against the Turk. For example,
Richard Montagu characterized the Turks as “the grand professed
enemies of CHRISTIANS, Christianity, CHRIST, qua tales,” who,
for all their differences, together constitute the universal Christian
church.39 Montagu’s publication of two pamphlets in 1624 and 1625,
titled A gagg for the new gospell? No. A new gagg for an old goose
and Appello Caesarem, provoked controversy for venturing to narrow
the doctrinal differences between the English and Roman churches
and for accusing the Puritans of threatening the via media that James
favored. James’s support of pan-Christian unity also paved the way for
the rise of William Laud, who began to gain royal favor in the 1620s
and would attempt to carry out the displacement of English Calvinism
by Arminianism.40 Laud and other members of the Durham House
group began publicizing their views in the 1620s through sermons that
countered the central Calvinist doctrine of predestination. His program
amounted to a turning away from the iconoclasm and inwardness of the
Reformed tradition to a renewed emphasis on ceremonial, sacramental,
and sensuous worship. It is important to acknowledge, however, that
Laud did not become archbishop of Canterbury until 1633 and his full
impact was not felt until Charles’s reign.
I want to suggest that The Renegado reveals the possibility of a
breakdown of the Calvinist consensus prior to and separate from the
ecclesiastical ramifications of Laud and the Durham House group. First,
the play precedes the formal dissolution of the Calvinist consensus,
which Nicholas Tyacke, in his book on the rise of English Arminianism,
has influentially argued was accomplished mainly through Bishop Neile
and the high church clerical cabal.41 Second, the play illustrates how
challenges to Calvinism may have emerged from the popular domain,
anticipating rather than reflecting later ecclesiastical reforms.42 Thus,
it points to a shift that did not emanate exclusively from high culture,
but was generated through popular media like the drama.43 Moreover,
the stage shows us that this shift was not just coincident with the com-
peting threat of Islamic conversion, but also powerfully informed by
this threat. Specifically, the stage turned to the material trappings of
Catholicism, including the miracle of a sacred relic, the bodily practice
of chastity, the outward ceremony of the sacraments, and the perform-
ance of good works, to provide objective correlatives for Christian
resistance, conversion, and redemption in relation to the embodied
threat of Islam. Thus, The Renegado does not merely reflect evidence
of lingering Catholic sympathies or early Laudian influences, but dem-
onstrates how, within the secular domain of the theater, the imagined
threat of Islam generated certain kinds of responses that resembled and
anticipated later ecclesiastical reforms.
Catholic Prophylactics and the Regulation of Reproduction
In addition, the stage reveals that the forging of a pan-Christian alliance

was not just politically strategic and advantageous, but also spoke to a
threat of conversion that operated on the level of the body. If the mate-
rial and ritualistic elements of Catholicism offered a form of resistance
to turning Turk that spiritualized faith alone could not provide, then
The Renegado’s reliance on Catholic models also provides insight into
how the threat of the Turk was imaginatively construed as a sexual
threat with potential reproductive consequences. In demonstrating the
need to fortify Protestant models of spiritual resistance with outward,
Catholic prophylactics, the stage conveyed the importance of regulat-
ing and controlling religious and proto-racial purity through sexual
intervention.
It is no accident that the only characters in the play who are not
candidates for Christian conversion or redemption are the Muslim
men. In contrast to the Muslim princess, the play renders Asambeg, the
Turkish viceroy and would-be suitor to the Christian virgin, inherently
unconvertible and ineligible for marriage to a Christian. Deceived and
abandoned by the Christians as well as the newly Christianized Donusa
at the end of the play, he determines to “hide / This head among the
deserts, or some cave / Filled with my shame and me, where I alone /
May die without a partner in my moan” (5.8.36–9). That these lines
of Asambeg’s are also the closing lines of the play signals that his soli-
tary abandonment, stripping him of any sexual partner, is the ultimate
factor in The Renegado’s comic denouement. Thus, the play renders
Asambeg completely impotent and construes his religious difference
as permanent and immutable. From the printed text of the play, it is
impossible to ascertain whether Asambeg’s religious difference was
accompanied by specific somatic differences indicated by cosmetics,
costume, or other physical markers in the performance. However,
the other male Turkish character in the play, Mustapha, is explicitly
mocked for his dark skin. Donusa’s rejection of Mustapha’s courtship
links her aversion to his complexion:
I have considered you from head to foot,

And can find nothing in that wainscot face
That can teach me to dote; nor am I taken
With your grim aspect or tadpole-like complexion. (3.1.47–50)
Her references to his “wainscot [i.e. with hardened and tanned skin,
resembling dark oak paneling] face” and “tadpole-like [black] com-
plexion” are further reinforced by her subsequent suggestion that
Mustapha should “let [his] barber wash [his] face” since it “look[s] yet
like a bugbear to fright children” (3.1.59–60). Quite likely, Mustapha
was blacked up with burnt cork or oil, a common theatrical practice by
the 1620s.44 While we cannot know for certain, Asambeg’s affiliation
with the more overtly darkened Mustapha suggests that he too may have
been played in blackface; the play refers to both characters as “Turks”
and does not distinguish between them in any categorical manner. At
the very least, Mustapha’s blackness suggests that at least some “Turks”
on the early modern stage were given dark complexions. In addition,
the play’s anxious avoidance of a sexual union between Asambeg and
Paulina suggests that the conversion triggered by such an act would
bear not just religious or spiritual consequences, but bodily ones as
well. That the miscegenated product of such a union would physi-
cally replicate the father reinforces what Lynda Boose has described
as “the deepest patriarchal fantasy of male parthenogenesis” in which
the woman’s body serves solely as the receptacle for male seed.45 The
Renegado precludes a conversion of this nature by vigilantly sustaining
the Christian heroine’s physical virginity.
Ritualizing Grimaldi’s Transgression and Redemption
Finally, The Renegado posits the redemption of its title character,

the renegade pirate Grimaldi, by translating both his denunciation of
Christianity and his ultimate return to the Christian fold into visible,
material terms. In order to externalize Grimaldi’s conversion and
reconversion, the play invests with great authority certain elements of
Catholic ritual, including the sacramental use of bread and wine, as well
as the holy intervention of the priest. We learn from a fellow seaman of
Grimaldi’s that his initial turn from Christianity was evidenced by his
disruption of a Catholic mass held in St. Mark’s church. As the captain
narrates, Grimaldi seemed to be struck with a “wanton, irreligious
madness” (4.1.29) when he suddenly
ran to the holy man
As he was doing the work of grace,
And, snatching from his hands the sanctified means,
Dashed it upon the pavement. (4.1.30–3)
Thus, the play externalizes Grimaldi’s spiritual transgression through
his physical desecration of the bread and wine of communion. The
particular moment in the mass that Grimaldi chooses to disrupt is the
very moment of incarnation, when God is embodied and body and
soul are joined. In construing his disruption of transubstantiation as
the ultimate form of sacrilege, the play validates the material sanctity
of the Eucharist, or the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. I contend
that this specific validation of the Catholic Eucharistic ceremony and
its investment in the sacred powers of the bread and wine purposefully
roots Grimaldi’s sin against Christianity in a visible and material act of
sacrilege. His outward transgression is necessitated by the larger context
of Christian–Muslim conversion that is itself material and bodily.
Similarly, Grimaldi’s redemption requires a visual and ceremo-
nial supplement to make the miracle of his Christian regeneration
Figure 3.5: A Eucharistic mass, from Thomas Williamson, The sword of the spirit to
smite in pieces that antichristian Goliah (London, 1613), sig. C1r. Reproduced by
permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
believable. Although his repentance is sincere, he fears that his act of

desecration was so egregious as to bar him from receiving absolution:
I look on
A deed of mine so fiend-like that repentance,
Though with my tears I taught the sea new tides,
Can never wash off. All my thefts, my rapes,
Are venial trespasses compared to what
I offered to that shape, and in a place, too,
Where I stood bound to kneel to’t. (4.1.74–80)
Like the renegade hero of A Christian Turned Turke, he presumes that
his repudiation of Christianity is irreversible and that his consignment to
eternal damnation is irredeemable. But The Renegado affords Grimaldi
a second chance to save himself, and as with Vitelli, this second chance
depends upon the intercession of the Jesuit priest. Francisco enters the
stage dressed “in a cope, like a bishop” (4.1.72) to hear Grimaldi’s
confession, thus enabling Grimaldi to recognize the very priest whom
he previously offended at St. Mark’s church. The visual materiality
of the cope endows Francisco with the authority to perform such a
powerful absolution and enhances the ritualized and ceremonial aspect
of the sacrament. The exchange between Francisco and Grimaldi that
follows Grimaldi’s confession further emphasizes the magical nature of
his redemption:
Francisco: ’Tis Forgiven!
I with his tongue (whom in these sacred vestments
With impure hands thou didst offend) pronounce it.
I bring peace to thee: see that thou deserve it
In thy fair life hereafter.
Grimaldi: Can it be?
Dare I believe this vision? Or hope
A pardon e’er may find me?
Francisco: Purchase it
By zealous undertakings, and no more
’Twill it be remembered.
Grimaldi: What celestial balm
I feel now poured into my wounded conscience! (4.1.80–9)
In instructing Grimaldi that he may “purchase” a pardon for his sins

through “zealous undertakings,” Francisco invokes a Catholic prac-
tice that was condemned by Protestants for its emphasis on outward
actions that could be easily simulated without sincere inner contri-
tion. Grimaldi alludes to this controversial debate again when he asks,
“Can good deeds redeem me?” (4.1.96). Whereas Calvinists empha-
sized the notion that faith must precede good works, Catholics believed
that faith alone was insufficient to achieve grace. In suggesting that
Grimaldi can earn back his place in heaven by performing good works,
The Renegado again demonstrates how outward acts can anchor and
enforce inward convictions, effecting a reversal for the Christian turned
Turk, and achieving what faith alone cannot.
In the years between the earliest performance of The Renegado and
its publication in 1630, the English government and church parishes
confronted the problem of what to do with real-life renegades who
needed to be reincorporated back into English society. By the 1630s
Laud’s influence was clearly evident in ceremonies for the reconversion
of English seamen who had converted to Islam and undergone circum-
cision. An official “Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado
or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turkism,” commissioned by
Laud in 1637, outlines a series of steps that a penitent could perform
over a period of several weeks in order to obtain clemency.46 Among
other things, these steps involved dressing in a white sheet and appear-
ing on the church porch with a white wand. A decade earlier, two
sermons preached at Minehead in Somerset on March 16, 1627, by
Edward Kellet and Henry Byam (published together under the title A
returne from Argier) exemplified a similar reliance on tangible steps for
reincorporating converts to Islam. The convert in question is said to
have been “bound for the streights” when he was “taken by Turkish
Pyrats, and made a slaue at Argier [Algiers], and living there in slav-
erie, by frailty and weaknesse, forsooke the Christian Religion and
turned Turke.”47 Kellet’s and Byam’s sermons may be seen to contra-
dict explicitly the tenets of Calvinist predestination in suggesting that
through sincere repentance and good works, the convert could redeem
himself and reverse his path to hell.
The sermons preached by Kellet and Byam on the occasion of the con-
vert’s “readmission” to the Church of England follow a similar pattern
for justifying the convert’s regeneration. For example, the various
actions that Kellet holds up as countermeasures to the convert’s sins
emphasize the utility of certain outward and material actions to redeem
one from hell. He advocates martyrdom and baptism as effective ways
of achieving grace, thereby challenging Calvinism’s emphasis on the
unalterable will of God. Rather than emphasize God’s judgment, Kellet
emphasizes God’s mercy. Above all, he holds up the power of repent-
ance, betokened by such outward expressions as “tears,” the changing
of “Habit and Vestmentes,” and the performance of good works, to
“[open] the Gate of heauen.”48 His insistence that a man’s repentance
has the power to halt God’s punishment and “[purchase] Grace” offers
a pointed revision of Calvinist predestination.49 Moreover, the sermon
shows that without such an allowance for free will and repentance, the
reconciliation of fallen renegades would not have been possible.
Although The Renegado anticipates Laud’s theological leanings in
many ways, it predates the beginning of his rise to power in the second
half of the 1620s. It would be a stretch to argue for the direct influence
of Laud’s Catholic-leaning practices in 1624, when Massinger’s The
Renegado was first performed on the public stage. The play is therefore
striking for its positive portrayal of a Jesuit priest, its investment in a
sacred relic and the sacramental powers of the Eucharist, penance, and
baptism, and its valorization of female virginity. While as early as the
beginning of the nineteenth century, critics began accusing Massinger
of Catholic loyalties, such an explanation oversimplifies the theological
valences of The Renegado. The point is not so much that Massinger was
a crypto-Catholic as that England itself was crypto-Catholic, though
not just in the sense that Stephen Greenblatt or Eamon Duffy have
influentially argued.50 Rather, factors outside of the Catholic-Protestant
conflict compelled a fusing of interests that reauthorized certain
Catholic models and anticipated a later high church theology. While I
am not claiming a direct causality between Christian engagement with
Islam and England’s reintegration of Catholic practices or its adoption
of Arminianism, I suggest that the stage itself played a role in showing
how various sacramental, ceremonial, and material Christian models
might offer protection against the threat of Islam and help redeem those
who had fallen under its sway. In particular, the stage gives insight into
how Islam’s conception as both a religious and an embodied threat of
conversion pressured a collapsing of Protestant-Catholic differences so
as to enable more tangible forms of resistance and redemption.
Secular Performance and Religious Miracles
At the same time, if The Renegado may be said to reveal the hidden
destinies of Catholicism in Protestant England, it should not be con-
cluded that this is a Catholic play, and nor is it a transparent reflection
of religious culture. Rather, the play draws upon the terms of religious
culture to refunction Catholic models through performance. The play
in fact reminds us of its own performativity at numerous points that
come close to parodying the miraculous religious transformations upon
which its tragicomic resolution depends. Donusa’s instantaneous con-
version upon having water literally thrown in her face (5.3.116) and
Grimaldi’s miraculous redemption, experienced as a “celestial balm . . .
poured into [his] wounded conscience,” exemplify theatrical moments
that call attention to their own performativity (4.1.80–9). Thus, to
some extent the play both undermines its miraculous transformations
through performance and exposes the performativity at the heart of
miracles. And yet such moments of equivocation are countered by
certain inflexible “truths” that the play vigilantly maintains: Paulina’s
intact virginity, her imperviousness to conversion. If in some ways the
play equivocates about whether religious moments retain their religious
significance by drawing attention to their performativity, in other ways
it insists on the efficacy of certain religious miracles that transcend
performance. Thus, the play’s awareness of its own performativity
serves both to undermine the religious significance of its content and to
reinforce it.51
The extent to which Paulina’s constant virtue and Christian faith
transcend performance is illustrated through a striking revelation that
directly follows Donusa’s baptism. Acting on the guidance of the Jesuit
Francisco, who is ironically lauded in the play for his superior skills of
equivocation, Paulina feigns conversion to Islam so as to deceive her
Turkish captors and facilitate the escape of Donusa and Vitelli. In rapid
succession, Donusa declares her miraculous conversion to Christianity,
Asambeg sentences Donusa and Vitelli to be separated and executed,
and Paulina interrupts their parting with a shocking outburst of laugh-
ter: “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (5.3.139). Paulina then says mockingly of Donusa’s
baptism, “Who can hold her spleen / When such ridiculous follies are
presented, / The scene, too, made religion?” (5.3.140–2). Expressly con-
trasting the performance of the “scene” to true “religion,” Paulina calls
attention to the very discrepancy between performance and religion that
threatens to evacuate drama of its religious significance. Paulina then
surprises the Christian and Turkish characters alike by announcing that
she “will turn Turk” and partner with Asambeg (5.3.152). It is in this
moment that the play demonstrates its commitment to an underlying
truth that defies performance, for equivocation in this case serves the
purpose of underscoring Paulina’s unshakable Christian constancy. We
are warned, crucially, from the previous scene to expect and see through
Paulina’s act because she is operating under the guidance of Francisco,
who has relayed to her a set of secret instructions (5.2.92). While the
other characters in the play believe Paulina’s act of apostasy to be real,
the audience knows it to be mere performance. In the previous scene
we have heard Paulina confide to Manto and Carazie, whose help she
later enlists in executing Francisco’s secret plan, that her “chastity is
preserved by miracle,” so that they should never doubt it. She further
explains that though she may “counterfeit” “outward pride,” she is
“not in [her] disposition altered” (5.2.69, 71, 73). Despite the play’s
awareness of how performance potentially evacuates religious miracles,
the miracle that preserves Paulina’s sexual and religious constancy is
the one thing we don’t doubt. Thus, it is clear that while performance
in this play does not offer a transparent window on religion, it inadvert-
ently exposes “truths” that have religious significance.
In other ways as well the secular transformations generated by per-
formance produce something akin to a religious experience. As Anthony
Dawson puts it in a recent essay on secular performance, theater itself
is a kind of religion defined by moments of “sweaty transcendence.”52
Pressing beyond the question of how the theater directly engages reli-
gious themes or redeploys religious language, Dawson importantly
draws attention to how the theater’s modes of enactment are struc-
tured by religion. Alluding to an earlier essay that lays the groundwork
for this subsequent meditation on the relationship between religion
and drama, Dawson explores how theatrical impersonation effects a
“dynamic of presence and absence,” which is an “idea derived from the
Eucharistic controversy.”53 I would say that this dynamic describes The
Renegado’s engagement of religion on multiple levels, characterizing
its performance of miracles, its renegotiation of religious discourses
and ideologies, and its treatment of material props. The penultimate
scene in which a secular prop is transformed into a vehicle for Christian
escape, and a vehicle for the play’s tragicomic resolution, exemplifies
the way the theater’s secular transformations replicate the dual pres-
ence and absence informed by Eucharistic controversy. The scene is
taken up with Vitelli’s receipt of a baked meat pie, which Francisco has
managed to smuggle into his prison cell. Upon “pierc[ing]” its “midst”
to discover what “mystery” it conceals, Vitelli turns up “a scroll bound
up in a packthread” (5.7.3–5). Following the scroll’s instructions, Vitelli
uses the packthread to draw up a ladder of ropes from outside the castle
window. Thus, the tragicomic resolution of the play is facilitated by the
most mundane of objects – a baked meat pie – that conceals in its midst
an equally mundane but practical packthread. In effect, the meat pie’s
successful transformation into a means of Christian escape completes
the transubstantiation that Grimaldi interrupts in his initial turn from
the Christian church. Religious analogue and parody go hand in hand,
as the miracle of turning bread into body is rewritten as a transforma-
tion of meat pie into rope ladder. On the one hand, the scene dem-
onstrates how the theater transforms religion into something secular,
illustrating Dawson’s underlying claim that the stage is “a secular, and
secularizing institution.”54 But on the other hand, even the terms of
this transformation illustrate the stage’s debt to religious culture, its
intimate engagement with it. When Vitelli refers to Francisco’s interces-
sion as “a pious miracle,” he is being completely sincere, even if this
sincerity contains multiple layers of irony (5.7.16). If theater has the
potential to undermine miracles, it also has the power to create new
ones. While I certainly would not argue that the stage is a direct outlet
for religious doctrines or discourses, I am convinced that even its trans-
formations of religion into something else are informed by religious
structures, and that these transformations sustain both the presence and
absence of religion in ways that are simultaneously playful, complex,
and sophisticated.
But what ultimately is the status of the Catholic forms that inform
the miracle of a meat pie’s transformation, and that I have been arguing
in this chapter and the previous one signal the gendered and embodied
limits of a spiritualized Christian faith? Are these Catholic forms merely
a means to an end, a way of apprehending a more important (non-
religious) difference between Christian and Muslim, or do they matter
in their own right? If critics such as Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti
find fault with some New Historicist critics who treat the representa-
tion of religious subject matter as a screen for other power struggles,
what I am advocating is not so much a middle ground as a position
that encompasses both religion and its role in relation to larger power
struggles.55 What I hope to expose is not simply how religion becomes
readable as race in these plays, but rather the process by which religious
identities become fused with national, embodied, and proto-racial
categories. In confronting the threat of conversion to Islam, the stage
draws on the religious forms at its disposal, revealing through its reau-
thorization of the older, derided forms of Catholicism the inadequacy
of Protestantism to imaginatively address this new threat. At the same
time, however, the challenge of imagining Christian strategies to resist
and redeem conversion to Islam leads the stage to negotiate a Christian
practice that, in ways independent of the ecclesiastical domain, suggests
an ecumenical position and even anticipates Laudian reforms. Thus, the
stage’s negotiation of religious models to address the threat of conver-
sion to Islam is both about something that exceeds religious difference
and about how that something in turn reshapes popular Christian
practice and identity.
Chapter 4
“Reforming” the Knights of Malta:

Male Chastity and Temperance in
Five Early Modern Plays
While heralded as heroic figures for their crusades against Muslim

imperialism during the Middle Ages, the Knights of Malta had fallen
into disrepute by the mid-sixteenth century. Up until the Reformation,
this pan-European religious and military order had received substantial
support from the English crown, but in 1540 King Henry VIII dissolved
the Order in England, and outlawed their customary apparel with its
distinctive Maltese cross.1 As a Catholic Order the Knights’ allegiance
was to the pope, not the king, and in addition to this their increasing
association with piracy and other lawless behavior made them identifi-
able with the loathsome figure of the renegade. Subsequent to their
denouncement in England, a variety of English publications condemned
the Knights for their Catholic allegiance and their corsair activi-
ties, accusing them as well of sexual promiscuity and other forms of
overindulgence – of living “betwixt bawds and banquets.”2 Protestant
English writers in fact attributed the Knights’ degraded morals to
their Catholic vows, and in particular to the vow of celibacy, so redo-
lent of the priesthood. Nonetheless, the Knights reappeared on the
popular stage in at least five plays between the late 1580s and the early
1620s.3 In this chapter I explore why English playwrights featured
members of this outlawed and denounced Order in roles that often
celebrate their heroism against the Turks, and redeem their disgraced
reputations not by making them conform to Protestant ideals but by
rehabilitating the very vow of celibacy that had come to define them in
the popular imagination as incorrigibly Catholic.
In some of these plays, the positive deployment of Catholic Knights on
the post-Reformation stage engages with the general ecumenical move-
ment occasioned by the territorial and religious threat of the Ottoman
empire. Particularly in the reign of King James, the perception of a
shared Muslim enemy generated an official discourse of pan-Christian
alliance that reinvigorated the rhetoric of the Crusades.4 However, I
“Reforming” the Knights of Malta 153
also want to suggest that these dramatic representations of the Knights
of Malta all reflect the imaginative capacities of theater to test and
redefine cultural boundaries in new ways. The stage simultaneously
registered the dishonored status of the Knights and embraced their
Catholicism, as well as translating their vow of celibacy into something
else entirely. This complex and nuanced recuperation suggests a crea-
tive attempt to grapple with the perceived threats of Muslim conquest
and conversion, and to envision a model of Christian masculinity that
might effectively combat or resist these threats.
In this chapter I analyze the role of the Knights of Malta in five
Renaissance stage plays: Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (c.1589),
Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c.1589), John Fletcher,
Nathan Field and Philip Massinger’s The Knight of Malta (c.1618),
John Webster’s The Devil’s Law-case (c.1619), and Philip Massinger’s
The Maid of Honor (c.1621–2). Although all were popular in their
time, they have, with the exception of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, been
largely overlooked by modern critics, and the plays’ shared interest in
the Knights of Malta has gone unnoticed.5 Given the thirty-year span of
time over which these plays were first performed, it is quite remarkable
how consistently they represent the Knights in ways that fly in the face
of the Reformed English church. I argue that if these plays “reform” the
Knights of Malta, it is by returning them to their most Catholic of vows
– the vow of celibacy – and that this reauthorization of Catholicism
speaks not simply to desires for ecumenical Christian unity against
Islam, but to the particular ways in which Islam’s religious and imperial
threat legitimated a return to Catholic models of embodied resistance.
All five of these plays focus theatrically on the Knight’s body as a
site of religio-political conflict and resistance. If, as illustrated through
Chapter 3 above, male Christian subjects are eligible for redemption
in ways that females are not, the Knights of Malta provided a model
through which masculine redemption could be imagined. In recuperat-
ing the Order as an exemplary body of genteel, chaste, and honorable
Christian men, the plays offer an embodied masculine ideal that serves
as a corrective to the denigrated male renegade, a category that collapsed
Christian merchants, privateers, and explorers into figures of lawless-
ness and self-serving godlessness. Furthermore, this ideal addressed
fears not only of Islamic conversion and bodily contamination but also
of imperial conquest: these plays imply a homology between embodied
male chastity and territorial protection.
The settings of these plays on Rhodes, Malta, and Sicily –
Mediterranean islands straddling the unstable boundary between
western Europe and the Ottoman empire – evoked an extended history
of siege, conquest, and reconquest. In addition, these vulnerable island
settings invoked fears about England’s own vulnerability to inva-
sion. In the late sixteenth century England was still a peripheral island
nation with a long history of imperial subjugation by more powerful
empires. Just as the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes, Malta, and
Sicily had pronounced histories of conquest by Christian and Muslim
empires, England regarded its own past in terms of a series of conquests
by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans.6 Given the
Ottoman empire’s increasing incursions into eastern Europe and its
progress as far as the gates of Vienna, the seat of the Holy Roman
Empire, its threat of a possible fifth imperial conquest was not wholly
unrealistic. In addition, as a number of critics have recently shown,
London’s own cultural landscape was changing drastically as the result
of its participation in global trade. A growing immigrant population
generated fears of change and cultural difference, and locations such
as the port and the royal exchange were increasingly regarded as sites
susceptible to penetration by foreign visitors and material imports.7
But why would the stage foreground male bodies to imagine resist-
ance to territorial and cultural invasion when there existed, even by
this time, an established tradition of linking anxieties about inva-
sion to female sexuality? From a practical perspective, the majority
of Christians venturing into the Mediterranean and its territories for
purposes of commerce, military service, or diplomacy were male, so an
interest in vulnerable manhood resonated with this reality. On another
level, the Knight’s vow of chastity cemented a commitment to pan-
Christian brotherhood, which symbolized the strategic alliances between
Christian subjects and nations (Catholic and Protestant) against the
common Muslim enemy. But these plays also modeled a distinct kind
of masculinity that participated in the imaginative work of cultivating
a Christian and, perhaps more specifically, English masculinity. This
masculine ideal was forged in contradistinction to the fallen renegade
or the Muslim tyrant, and provided a model for his redemption. In val-
orizing a masculine ideal that was temperate, genteel, and committed to
regulating reproductive purity through sexual restraint, the stage drew
a distinction between Christian and Muslim identity that was increas-
ingly racialized. In addition, these plays focused on masculinity to
distinguish between honorable and dishonorable methods of conquest,
cultivating Christian conquest in opposition to Ottoman tyranny and
providing an early template for imagining English imperialism.
One of the ways that the early modern stage redeemed potential ren-
egades as honorable Knights of Malta was by reimagining the historic
Ottoman sieges of Rhodes and Malta. Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
refigures the Christian victory at Malta as a critique of the commercial
greed and moral compromises that belie pan-Christian alliances and
their rhetoric of holy war against Muslim infidels. Somewhat similarly,
Fletcher, Field, and Massinger’s The Knight of Malta rewrites the
Christian victory at Malta as a cautionary tale in which the Christian
brotherhood triumphs by reaffirming its vow of chastity and rooting
out a bad seed. By contrast, Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda retells the
Christian loss of Rhodes as a triumph of Christian virtue, figured
through a narrative of martyrdom. The errant male protagonist, a
Knight of Rhodes, learns a lesson in Christian virtue and national
allegiance from his female lover, who single-handedly defends Rhodes
against Muslim attack and martyrs herself rather than sacrifice her
virginity to the sultan.
Other plays, such as Webster’s The Devil’s Law-case and Massinger’s
The Maid of Honor, solidify the bonds of Christian brotherhood by
dramatizing the dissolution of rivalries between Christian men and
redirecting their aggression against a common Turkish enemy. On the
one hand, the Christian brotherhood valorized in these plays is sug-
gestive of the priesthood in that it preserves the vow of celibacy and
privileges homosocial relationships over heterosexual ones. But on the
other hand, it reappropriates these qualities in order to meet different
kinds of objectives that attain relevance in specific cross-cultural con-
texts. Because the resolutions of these plays involve the resecuring of
male bonds against both the Muslim foe and female love-interests, they
also reverse the expected outcome of comedy by substituting homoso-
cial brotherhood for heterosexual marriage. In both Massinger’s The
Maid of Honor and Webster’s The Devil’s Law-case, comic resolution
is achieved not through heterosexual marriage but through the cement-
ing of male fellowships that redirect masculine energy against the
Muslim foe. These plays physically separate their heroes and heroines,
even relegating them to nunneries and monasteries, and in effect align
the safeguarding of national security with sexual chastity.
In replacing Protestantism’s emphasis on marriage with cloistered
Catholic alternatives, plays that venerate the Knight of Malta’s vow of
chastity not only reshape established generic conventions, but reveal
how these conventions are informed by particular religious practices,
structures, and belief systems. Narratives of interfaith seduction, resist-
ance, and redemption reform generic expectations by refiguring martyr-
dom as triumphant and Islamic seduction as tragic for Christian women
but redeemable and potentially comic for Christian men. Together,
gender and genre comprise an interwoven thread that I trace through-
out this study to help reveal the complex stakes involved in dramatic
Figure 4.1: A Knight of Malta, from William Segar, Honor military and ciuill
(London, 1602). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
depictions of conversion to Islam. Whereas my second chapter focused
primarily on the virgin martyr tradition as a model for female sexual
resistance, and my third chapter examined distinctions between male
and female, and Christian and Muslim, models of redemption, this
chapter focuses on models of male sexual resistance and “gentle” con-
quest. Of course, none of these models exists in a vacuum, and all of
them, I argue, suggest interrelations among the group of plays that I
am examining. For example, as I discuss further below, plays about the
Knights of Malta often employ chaste heroines, derived from the virgin
martyr tradition, to model examples of constancy and self-restraint for
the Knights to emulate.
These virginal heroines not only play a didactic role in mod-
eling religious resistance, but also teach the Knights how to conquer
women, and by extension territories, in chaste and mutually consenting
ways. Thus, the masculine ideal shaped by these plays serves as an early
prototype for English imperialism, showing how defenders of Christian
territories might also be successful colonizers and missionaries. The
brief discussion of John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s
The Travails of the Three English Brothers (c.1607) that concludes
this chapter demonstrates how the Knights of Malta supply a model
for Christian brotherhood that enables effective resistance and also
becomes extended into a missionary agenda. In this way, I reveal how
chaste masculine heroism provides a link between plays that dramatize
Christian resistance to Islam and those that dramatize incipient forms
of Christian imperialism.
Brief History of the Order
The Knights of Malta (also known in earlier periods as the Knights of St.
John, the Knights Hospitallers of Jerusalem, and the Knights of Rhodes)
were a pan-European religious and military Order that operated under
papal jurisdiction.8 Originally founded in the mid-eleventh century
to provide care for pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, the Knights assumed
a military role in the First Crusade of 1099. In 1113, they received
permission from the pope to become a religious foundation with all
members taking vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Throughout
the Crusades, they devoted themselves to fighting a holy war against
Muslim territorial invasion and the spread of Islam.
When they were driven out of Jerusalem in 1291 by the Turks, the
Knights first relocated to Cyprus and subsequently, in 1308, took
the island of Rhodes from the Byzantines. Although they promoted
a rhetoric of Christian defense, they were also aggressors in a violent
struggle to accumulate territory and power. Meanwhile the Ottoman
Turks had been consolidating their possessions in Asia Minor and
southeast Europe, and under Sultan Mehemed II (1451–81) they
conquered Constantinople in 1453, Serbia in 1459, and Bosnia in
1464. Venice lost a number of possessions to the Turks and Genoa
was forced to give up several trading stations on the Black Sea. In
1480, the Turks laid siege to Rhodes, but were beaten back by the
Knights. In 1522 the Ottomans attacked Rhodes again under Sulaiman
the Magnificent (1520–66). Despite the fact that the Knights themselves
were drawn from a host of noble European families and thus comprised
a pan-European organization, the Order struggled to win support
during the long siege that followed. As Palmira Brummett has shown,
European reluctance to aid the Knights was related to a combination
of conflicting truces and tensions (including a tenuous truce between
the Ottomans and Venice, and war between France and Spain), which
involved competition for foodstuff and other trade.9 In addition, the
Knights had begun to make enemies among other Christians because
of their piratical activities, and as Brian Blouet notes, the Order
had already “become an anachronism” to certain Christian inter-
ests.10 Under pressure from Rhodian townsfolk, the Knights surren-
dered Rhodes to the Ottomans and departed in 1523 for the Venetian
island of Crete (or “Candy” as the English called it). They then sailed
on to the port of Messina on the northeast tip of Sicily, but were driven
out by the outbreak of plague in 1523.
After brief settlements on the island of Sicily, and at Civitavecchia
and Viterbo, the Knights finally settled in 1530 on the barren and poorly
defended island of Malta, which was given to them in fief by Charles
V.11 Although the Knights retained a degree of neutrality on Malta and
were not required to provide the services customarily performed by
vassals, they governed under the fiefdom of Spain and were not legally
autonomous. On Malta, the Knights confronted hostility from the
islanders (whose population at the time was about 20,000), weak mili-
tary support, and a shortage of foodstuffs and natural resources, which
made them entirely dependent on Sicilian imports. In vain, they agitated
for relocation back to Rhodes or to Syracuse. With the Order in a pre-
carious state, the Knights devoted themselves to improving Malta’s for-
tifications. Because of the growing problem of piracy along the Barbary
coast, Malta’s strategic importance had increased for the Ottomans in
that it provided a key fortress for control of the central Mediterranean
seaways. The Turks attempted an attack on Malta in 1551, but were
driven back. They again laid siege to Malta in 1565 and after a long and
Figure 4.2: Domenico Zenoi, “Assedio de L’Isola di Malta” or “The Siege of Malta”
(1565). Reproduced by permission of the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.
brutal battle were defeated by the Knights under the Grand Master Jean
de la Valette. As Aaron Kitch has put it, the Christian defense of Malta
during this four-month assault would go down in English history as an
“apocalyptic struggle between East and West.”12 Stories of the “mirac-
ulous” Christian victory were subsequently told and retold many times,
spawning a production of pamphlets across Europe aimed at glorifying
the providential triumph of Christian forces against the Muslim enemy
and attracting support for future Christian missions.13 The Knights as a
pan-European crusading force were back in business.
Catholic Roots
From the English perspective, the Knights of Malta had become a source
of controversy because of their Catholic roots and their continued juris-
diction under the pope.14 Whereas in 1530 there were eight langues
in the Order – Aragon, Germany, France, Italy, Castile, Provence,
Auvergne, and England – in 1540 the English dissolved their langue
with the passing of a parliamentary statute. This statute deemed English
membership in the Knights of Malta treasonous because of the Order’s
recognition of the pope’s authority. In addition, it outlawed in England,
Ireland, and any other English dominion the wearing of any apparel
or “sign, mark, or token” associated with the Knights, reclaimed their
properties, and rendered their “privileges of Sanctuaries” “utterly void
and of none effect.”15 English Knights were forced to choose between
their loyalties to the English monarch and the Catholic pope, and a
number of them were executed or forced into exile. Though the English
langue was briefly restored by Queen Mary in 1557, it was again dis-
solved in 1559 (six years before the Knights’ victory on Malta) by
Queen Elizabeth.
Of course, despite the Reformation, English intolerance for Catholics
was tempered by their shared stake in combating the Ottoman Turks.
England’s sense of peril associated with events such as the siege
of Malta frequently overshadowed the influences of sectarian divi-
sions. Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker decreed that public
prayers be said for Malta’s deliverance from the Turkish siege. As
Bernadette Andrea contends, these prayers “display an uncanny
dynamic of identification and disavowal” with regard to the Knights’
mission in Malta.16 An attitude of “identification and disavowal” may
be said to characterize English views of the Knights throughout the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, though these views shifted
in response to specific political and economic developments. But even
during the Laudian reforms of the 1630s, which were perceived as
making a number of concessions to Catholicism, the Knights of Malta
retained unassimilable Catholic associations.
To offer one example, Thomas Fuller’s The historie of the holy
warre, first published in 1639, repeatedly condemns the Knights of
Malta for their licentiousness, corruption, treasonous allegiance to the
pope, and superstition. Describing England’s eventual break from the
Knights, Fuller explains,
But Barnabe’s day itself hath a night, and this long-lived Order, which in
England went over the graves of all others, came at last to its own. [The
Knights] were suffered to have rope enough, till they had haltered them-
selves in a Pramunire: for they still continued their obedience to the Pope
. . . whose usurped authority was banished out of the land.17
Fuller, a respected church cleric and historian, as well as a moderate
royalist, clearly viewed the dissolution of the English langue of the
Knights as a positive conclusion to their treasonous allegiances. He
further mocks them for their inadequacy in martial affairs, stating,
“Better it had been that Cardinall Columna had been at his beads,
or in his bed, or anywhere else, then in the camp in Egypt, where by
his indiscreet counsel he brought all the lives of the Christians into
danger.”18 The Knights, Fuller in effect argues, were distracted from
their important task of combating the Muslims by their adherence to
Catholic devotional practices.19
Probably the anti-Catholic charge against the Knights most directly
relevant to my present discussion is Fuller’s accusation of sexual licen-
tiousness, which he links ironically to their vowed celibacy. He explains
that the Knights “lived inter scorta & epulas – betwixt bawds and
banquets,” and goes on to surmise that it is “no wonder if their forced
virginity was the mother of much uncleannesse: for commonly those
who vow not to go the highway of Gods ordinance, do haunt base and
unwarrantable by-paths.”20 Fuller’s reference to the Knights’ degener-
ate sexual reputation resonated with a range of earlier English texts. In
A true relation of the travailes (1614), William Davies explains, “The
manner of their Oath of Knighthood is this: that they shall neuer marry,
by reason they shall neuer have Children legitimate . . . yet they are
suffered to haue as many whores as they will.”21 Davies’s distinction
between bachelorhood and celibacy illustrates how the Knights’ unmar-
ried status might produce the opposite of chaste behavior, explicitly
manifested through the production of illegitimate children. Somewhat
similarly, George Sandys criticized the Knights for interpreting their
vow of chastity as a ban on marriage but not as a ban on unmarried
sexual promiscuity.22 He describes how easily the courtesans in Malta
made customers of the Knights of Malta, using “the arte of their eyes”
to “inueagle those continent by vow, but contrary in practise, as if
chastitie were onely violated by marriage.”23 These condemnations
of the Knights’ vow of celibacy as a condition that helped facilitate
sexual incontinence stand in stark contrast to the popular depiction of
the Knights of Malta on the Renaissance stage. As I will demonstrate
below, if the English stage faults the Knights of Malta for corrupt or
lascivious behavior, it redeems them not by advocating their abandon-
ment of the vow of chastity but rather by reclaiming this vow and
enforcing it.
Thomas Kyd, Soliman and Perseda: An Object Lesson in Failed

Male Heroism
First performed fifty years prior to the publication of Fuller’s Historie

of the holy warre, Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda also critiques
the Knights for their degraded values; however, it suggests that the
Knights can regain their honor not by shedding their Catholic associa-
tions but by re-embracing the virtues of chastity. The play takes as its
subject the 1522 siege of Rhodes, figuring this historic Christian loss
through the individual failures of its flawed hero. Simultaneously,
it recasts the Ottoman invasion as a sexual seduction in which the
Christian heroine successfully resists the Turkish sultan. Thus, the
play models the redemption of a Christian Knight through the exem-
plary chastity of its heroine, illustrating how masculine reform may
be modeled upon an example of feminine resistance and restraint that
centers on sexual chastity. By depicting Perseda’s willingness to fight
to the death as an act of martyrdom, the play reconfigures the political
tragedy of Rhodes’s conquest as a personal triumph of Christian resist-
ance. Moreover, it explicitly contrasts Perseda’s honorable example
with the inadequacies of its male protagonist, suggesting that Christian
male heroism might be redeemed in accordance with this female model
of heroic resistance and restraint.24
One way in which Soliman and Perseda juxtaposes feminine
heroism and masculine failure is through its two protagonists’ varied
success at interpellating the gendered ideals of medieval romance. The
play opens with an international sporting competition that invokes
the medieval fantasy of a chivalric code that transcends religious and
national differences. We soon learn, however, that the tournament’s
Turkish representative had been sent only to ascertain “how Rhodes
is fenc’d” and how the Turkish sultan “best may lay / [his] neuer
failing siege to win” the island (1.5.5–6).25 Erastus, the Christian hero,
wins the tournament, but remains unaware of the sultan’s ulterior
motives. Soon after, he engages in a duel that further illustrates his
blindness to Rhodes’s national interests and prevents him from par-
ticipating in the war against Soliman’s army. Having killed a fellow
Christian Knight in a misguided attempt to protect his beloved’s
honor, Erastus flees the island and takes refuge in Soliman’s Ottoman
court, drawn by the Turkish reputation for “renowned” and “heroyi-
call” virtues (2.1.270–1). Thus, the interests and values of the courtly
lover are set in opposition to those of his country. Once in Turkey,
Erastus forges a chivalric bond with the sultan by engaging him in a
friendly swordfight. Soliman beseeches Erastus not to hold back, but
to “thinke me thine enemie, / [and] euer after thy continuall friend”
(3.1.109–10). In turn, Erastus “ouercomes Soliman,” and they walk
away the best of friends. However, the play’s insistence on Soliman’s
essential Muslim difference problematizes the traditional logic of
chivalry in which, as Lisa Celovsky puts it, “competition paradoxi-
cally establishes fellowship.”26 The play soon exposes this masculine
code of chivalry that proclaims to transcend religious and national
differences as a misguided and outdated belief system.
Arthur Ferguson has argued that the decline and transformation of
chivalric idealism resulted from an emerging national consciousness
in the early modern period that privileged collectivity over the indi-
vidualistic emphasis of chivalry.27 In some ways, Soliman and Perseda
seems to exemplify this argument. However, the play also offers a more
complex picture of early modern political nationalism that challenges
the neat trajectory outlined by Ferguson and any sense of a clear opposi-
tion between chivalry and nationalism. In identifying Rhodian national
interests with the more general Christian opposition against the Turk,
the play reveals the impossibility of isolating “national interests” from
a more universal Christian cause. Further, in conflating military and
sexual conquest, it demonstrates how religious and national interests
are imaginatively bound up with anxieties about bodily contamination
and miscegenation. At the same time, the play represents the Christian
cause not in collective but in highly individualistic terms – as a love
triangle between three individual characters – thus replicating the sup-
posed individualism of chivalric romance. In this way, Soliman and
Perseda captures the emergence of national consciousness as an uneven
and messy process, rather than a clear-cut or modernizing response to
the outmoded ideals of the Middle Ages.
As Erastus progressively pushes the boundaries between male
bonding and treasonous behavior, he demonstrates the various points
at which they intersect. For example, the playful camaraderie between
Soliman and Erastus escalates when Soliman appoints Erastus as
captain of the Janissaries, a position that English audiences associ-
ated with compulsory conversion to Islam and imperial expeditions
against Christian countries. Erastus negotiates this conflict by accept-
ing on condition that he not be forced to convert or to fight against
his native Rhodes – an impossible compromise that exposes the inex-
tricability of religious and national allegiances and the lack of middle
ground between a Christian and Muslim, or Rhodian and Turkish,
identity. While Erastus remains a passive resident of Soliman’s court,
Soliman sends his henchman Brusor to lead the attack on Rhodes. Thus,
the Christian failure to ward off the Turks at the historical battle of
Rhodes is presented as an object lesson in failed male heroism.
If Erastus’s inadequacy exposes a potential distinction between the
rank of Knighthood and honorable behavior befitting such a title,
the play offers a more extreme parallel to Erastus through the comic
character of Basilisco, an Italian Knight of Rhodes. As Lukas Erne has
observed, the character of Basilisco is Kyd’s invention, not present in
his primary source, Henry Wotton’s A courtlie controuersie of Cupids
cautels (1578), or in Jacques Yver’s Printemps d’Yver (1572), the
French text upon which Wotton based his translation.28 Thus, Basilisco
underscores the thematic shaming of the Knights of Rhodes that is
unique to Kyd’s play. Moreover, he demonstrates how the inconstancy
exemplified by Erastus can lead not just to conversion, but to an embod-
ied corollary. Given to boastful pronunciations about his military and
amorous exploits, Basilisco quickly abandons his bravado the minute
he is put to the test by Soliman’s invading forces. Confronted with the
threat of death, he immediately forsakes his countrywomen, Perseda
and Lucina, and opts for conversion, proclaiming, “I turne, I turne;
oh, saue my life, I turne” (3.5.11). Then, misreading his subsequent
conversion ceremony as a testimony to his self-importance, he brags of
being subjected to circumcision: “Amidst their Church they bound me
to a pillar, / And to make triall of my valiancie, / They lopt a collop of
my tendrest member” (4.2.21–3). As the play makes clear, it is precisely
Basilisco’s lack of “valiancie” that proves his inadequacy as a Knight
and leads to his emasculating conversion and circumcision. In addition
to offering an exaggerated and comic version of Erastus’s failures as
a Knight, Basilisco demonstrates the potential bodily consequences of
masculine inconstancy.
Rather than stage the siege of Rhodes as a military operation, the
play emphasizes the ramifications of Turkish invasion by depicting
the sexual captivity of Erastus’s beloved, the Christian virgin Perseda,
and her countrywoman Lucina. Presented with these Christian women
as “part of the spoile of Rhodes,” Soliman delights, “This present
pleaseth more then all the rest” (4.1.66, 68). Handing Lucina over to
Brusor, Soliman says, “Heere, Brusor, this kinde Turtle shall be thine;
/ Take her and vse her at thy pleasure” (4.1.73–4). He then stakes his
claim on Perseda, saying, “But this kinde Turtle is for Soliman, / That
her captiuitie may turne to blisse” (4.1.75–6). In paying homage to
her beauties, Soliman’s blazon includes a long list of comparisons that
draw attention to the unnaturalness of their threatened sexual union,
itemizing Perseda’s
Cheekes, where the Rose and Lillie are in combat;

Necke, whiter then the snowie Apenine;
Brests, like two ouerflowing Fountaines,
Twixt which a vale leads to the Elisian shades. (4.1.82–5)29
This parody of courtly love conventions is enhanced by the contrast

between Soliman’s Turkish appearance, likely distinguished by a
turban, Turkish robes, and facial makeup, and Perseda’s “necke, whiter
then the snowie Apenine.”30 His mimicry of the Petrarchan lover only
points up his inappropriateness as a sexual partner for Perseda.
In contrast to Erastus, who displays much greater susceptibility to
Soliman’s courtship, Perseda staunchly resists any personal union with
the Turkish emperor: “Solimans thoughts and mine,” she proclaims,
“resemble / Lines parallel that neuer can be ioyned” (4.1.109–10). This
metaphor extends to describe Rhodes’s unwillingness to submit to
Turkey, but it is significant that it originates at the level of sexual
union between two differently gendered and increasingly racialized
bodies – a Christian woman and a Turkish man. When Soliman orders
Perseda to capitulate to his sexual advances or be put to death, Perseda
chooses martyrdom. Ultimately, her resistance models a strategy for
territorial resistance to Turkish invasion: the play suggests that rather
than submit to a mightier force, a true Christian should go down fight-
ing. When Perseda refuses Soliman, he orders her to kneel, “And at my
hands receiue the stroake of death. / Domde to thy selfe by thine owne
willfulness” (4.1.112–13). Echoing the constancy of Christian martyrs,
Perseda responds by inviting the execution: “Strike, strike; thy words
pierce deeper then thy blows” (4.1.114). But as Soliman wields his
sword over her head, he is halted by the sight of “her milke white neck,
that Alabaster tower” (4.1.122). A prelude to Desdemona’s “alabaster”
corpse, Perseda’s “milke white neck” constitutes both the vulnerable
sight that compels Soliman’s lust and the tower of virtue that stops him
from carrying out his murderous act. Overcome by this spectacle of
Christian virtue, Soliman spares Perseda’s life and grants her wish to
“liue a Christian Virgin still, / Vnlesse my state shall alter by my will”
(4.1.142–3). However, his miraculous conversion to Christian mercy
proves to be short-lived. He allows Perseda and Erastus to return to
Rhodes as his colonial governors, but soon regrets his decision and
hatches a plan to eliminate Erastus and obtain Perseda for himself.
In using Erastus’s colonial governorship to expose indirectly his
treason against Rhodes, the play suggests that Christian sovereignty,
even at the expense of annihilation, is the only acceptable outcome. To
dispose of Erastus, Soliman summons him back to Constantinople
to appear in court on trumped-up charges that he has committed
treason against Turkey. In court, false witnesses testify that Erastus
secretly vowed that “Rhodes must no longer beare the Turkish yoake”
(5.2.59). The irony is that the witnesses accuse Erastus of what would
have actually been the honorable action to take – freeing Rhodes from
Ottoman rule – whereas Erastus has in fact done no such thing. In
not committing treason against Soliman, Erastus is guilty of commit-
ting treason against Rhodes. The play’s dramatization of the treason
involved in betraying Christendom for Islam overshadows the less dire
charges of treason associated with the Knights of Malta for their dual
allegiance to both the pope and the English monarch. Erastus learns that
“friendship” with a Turk is an allegiance that cannot be trusted, and he
is forced to suffer the consequences of his erroneous judgment. Betrayed
by Soliman, he compares his accusers to “Synons,” the Greek spy in the
Aeneid, and himself to “poor Troy” (5.2.79). However, I would argue
that the play frames Erastus’s subsequent death by execution not as an
act of tragic martyrdom, but rather as the consequence of his failure to
extricate Rhodes from Soliman’s “yoake.”
By contrast, Perseda refuses to compromise her loyalties to Rhodes,
and it is upon her virtue and vow of protection that the island’s future
depends. Likely performed by Pembroke’s Men before a court audience,
the play clearly invokes both England and Queen Elizabeth through its
portrayals of Rhodes’s vulnerability to enemy attack and Perseda’s
virtuous defense of the island. Its heroic portrayal of Perseda resonates
with Elizabeth’s recent triumph against the invasion of the Spanish
Armada and her commitment to military resistance. At the same
time, the play both raises and assuages contemporary anxieties about
Elizabeth’s efforts to support commercial intercourse with the Ottoman
empire, as well as aid against Spain, by fostering diplomacy with the
Sultan.31 Basilisco, the foolish Italian Knight, draws attention to the
fact that with Erastus dead, Rhodes depends for its protection on a
woman: “The great Turque, whose seat is Constantinople, / Hath
beleagred Rhodes, whose chieftaine is a woman” (5.3.84–5). The
final words of the play, spoken by the allegorical character Death,
reinforce the correlation between Perseda and Elizabeth by suggesting
that although Perseda has died, her honor will live on just like “sacred
Cynthia’s friend,” or Queen Elizabeth, “whom Death did feare before
her life began” (5.5.37–8).
Perseda’s willingness to die by her own hand rather than “yeeld to”
Soliman’s “letcher[y]” offers a strategy of martyrdom that applies to
the protection of both her body and her country (5.3.60–2). In portray-
ing her death, the play refigures the popular story of the Sultan and the
Fair Greek, mentioned above in Chapter 2, in which the Ottoman siege
of Constantinople results in the captivity and beheading of a Christian
woman. Kyd’s take on the story, however, is unique in that it interprets
the Christian maiden’s death as a triumphant martyrdom rather than
as tragedy. Cross-dressing as a male soldier, Perseda implements an
ingenious plan to martyr herself by challenging Soliman to a swordfight
she knows she cannot win. (Tragically, we know that if Erastus had
remained loyal to Rhodes, he could have overcome Soliman in such a
contest.) In addition to shaming Erastus for his failure to defend Rhodes,
Perseda’s impersonation of a male soldier both protects her chastity and
enables her to flight in Rhodes’s self-defense. Coming “upon the walles
in mans apparell” to confront Soliman, she announces, “Thou are not
Lord of all; Rhodes is not thine” (5.4.20). She then spars with Soliman,
and, upon receiving the fatal blow, unmasks her true identity. In addi-
tion to revising the story of the Sultan and the Fair Greek, Perseda’s
orchestration of her own death at Soliman’s hands departs from
Kyd’s direct source, as well as from Kyd’s earlier Spanish Tragedy. In
Wotton’s A courtlie controuersie of Cupids cautels, Perseda is killed
accidentally by “two bullets sent from a Musket,” and in The Spanish
Tragedy’s play-within-a-play, Bel-imperia playing Perseda kills herself
after stabbing Balthazar playing Soliman.32 By contrast, Perseda’s plan-
ning of her own death in Soliman and Perseda ensures that it is neither
accidental nor shrouded with the shame of weak surrender or suicide.
Whereas Daniel Vitkus reads Perseda’s death as a “symbolic rape”
that signals her defeat, I read it as a willful act of resistance that is tri-
umphant because she controls it.33 Indeed, Perseda’s refusal to submit
lies at the heart of this play, which rewrites the masculine defeat at
Rhodes as a triumph of feminine resistance and chastity. In addition,
Perseda’s martyrdom transforms miscegenation into an act that spon-
taneously self-destructs. By planting poison on her lips, Perseda ensures
that the moment Soliman initiates sexual contract – by kissing her
lips – he simultaneously triggers his own death. Thus, Perseda orches-
trates Soliman’s demise by foreseeing his lustful act and, in doing so,
she also hastens their eternal separation. Although Soliman makes a
dying request to have his body “interd” together in the same tomb with
Perseda and Erastus (5.4.142), we know that Perseda and Soliman will
be forever divided in the afterlife by their separate destinies in heaven
and hell.
“Will Knights of Malta Be in League with Turks?”: Marlowe’s

The Jew of Malta
Contemporary in performance to Soliman and Perseda, The Jew

of Malta similarly revisits an earlier historical conflict between
Christian Knights and Ottoman Turks centered on the possession of
a Mediterranean island – this time, Malta.34 However, Marlowe’s
play diverges substantially from Kyd’s in that it critiques the Christian
Knights not for their alliance with the Turks, but for their alliance with
other Christians. As Emily Bartels has argued, Spain functions in the
play as an imperial competitor vying for control over Malta, thus liken-
ing Malta’s alliance with Spain to a colonial relationship, which Ferneze
then reproduces through his own subjugation of Barabas.35 According to
Bartels, while the play is unclear whether Ferneze’s misreading of Spain’s
“domination as alliance” results from “blindness or insight, naivete or
cunning,” his actions, however motivated, reflect poorly on him.36 The
close proximity between the play’s first performances and the 1588
attack of the Spanish Armada heightens the probability that English
audiences would have perceived Ferneze’s concessions in particularly
distasteful terms. In this sense, The Jew of Malta may be seen to affirm
Elizabeth’s resistance to an ecumenical alliance with Spain by exposing
how Ferneze’s alliance masks an inequitable power structure and selfish
economic motives under the rhetoric of Christian fellowship.
At the same time, there is a risk in concluding too easily that the
play unconditionally objects to Malta’s pan-Christian alliance with
Spain. Indeed, the object lesson illustrated through Erastus’s failure to
oppose the Turks at any cost resonates here. When the Spanish captain
Martin del Bosco arrives on Malta early in the second act, he explicitly
invokes the Christian loss of Rhodes in order to inspire Ferneze, the
Maltese governor, to ally with Spain. Encouraging the Maltese to refuse
to pay their tributary debt to the Turks and sever the Maltese-Turkish
league that exists at the start of the play, del Bosco reasons,
Will Knights of Malta be in league with Turks,
And buy it basely too for sums of gold?
My lord, remember that, to Europe’s shame,
The Christian isle of Rhodes, from whence you came,
Was lately lost, and you were stated here
To be at deadly enmity with Turks. (2.2.28–33)37
Of course, del Bosco wants to displace the Maltese-Turkish league so
that he can use Malta as a base for trading Turkish slaves: his own
economic motives expose his hypocrisy. Nevertheless, his appeal to
an inherent “enmity” between Christians and Turks and his charac-
terization of the Knights’ loss of Rhodes as “Europe’s shame” con-
stituted powerful arguments that could not be entirely dismissed by
English audiences. As del Bosco’s reference to the Christian loss of
Rhodes as “Europe’s shame” indicates, many understood the loss to
have resulted from the failure of Christian nations to band together
and support Rhodes. I would like to argue that as much as The Jew
of Malta exposes the costs of Christian fellowship and its hypocritical
religious rhetoric, it regards a Spanish-Maltese alliance as far preferable
to the absolutely untenable alternative of a Turkish-Maltese alliance. In
imagining Malta under Turkish subjugation, the play constructs an
immediate either/or contrast between Ottoman and Spanish coloni-
zation that forces Ferneze, and the play’s audience, to make a hard
choice. While unwilling to idealize pan-Christian alliances or to depict
the Christian-Turkish conflict as a clear-cut binary opposition, The Jew
of Malta presents the Spanish-Maltese alliance as Ferneze’s best avail-
able option. In this regard, it may share more with Kyd’s Soliman and
Perseda, as well as the Knight of Malta plays of the Jacobean period,
than one might first presume. Furthermore, the play suggests that what
makes this alternative untenable is not merely its religious implica-
tions but the imperial and embodied repercussions that were becoming
inextricable from the religious threat of Islam.
The Jew of Malta explores the conditions that render certain kinds of
alliance natural or unnatural, acceptable or unacceptable, by drawing
analogies between political alliances and various personal alliances
based on such bonds as friendship, romantic union, and enslave-
ment. Along these lines, I want to suggest that the play underscores
the unnaturalness of a Maltese-Turkish alliance by re-envisioning it
through the perverse sexual relationship between the Turkish Ithamore
and the Christian Bellamira. In imagining a sexual relationship between
a Muslim slave and a Christian courtesan, The Jew of Malta reveals
its shared concern with other plays about the bodily consequences of
Muslim-Christian contact within an imperial framework. The union
between Bellamira and Ithamore presents a Turkish-Christian “league”
in the form of miscegenation, revealing its deviant nature through a
comic spectacle of sexual and bodily degradation.
I use the term “miscegenation” loosely here to describe an unnatu-
ral sexual union, with the understanding that the precise nature of
Ithamore’s ethnic and physical distinctions is frustratingly difficult to
pin down. Marlowe may have intended him to be a Thracian or Greek
who was enslaved and converted by the Ottoman empire, judging
from Ithamore’s self-description as born in “Thrace” and “brought
up in Arabia” (2.3.130).38 At the same time, Ithamore is repeatedly
identified by other characters simply as a “Turk,” and as critics have
pointed out, his name contains a homophone for “Moor,” perhaps
implying a connection to North Africa. As Julia Reinhard Lupton has
observed, his name also “exploits the typological linkages between
Islam and Judaism” through its similarity to “Ithamar,” Aaron’s
youngest son.39 At best, Ithamore represents an amalgamation of sub-
jugated, non-Christian differences. But if modern critics are incapable
of knowing exactly what Ithamore looked like, the play repeatedly
acknowledges how his appearances signified in negative ways, through
jokes that center on his physical debasement. For example, Ithamore
comments to himself upon reading an invitation to Bellamira’s house,
“I wonder what the reason is. It may be she sees more in me than I can
find in myself, for she writes further that she loves me ever since she
saw me” (4.2.31–3). The less attractive Ithamore is, the funnier his
speculation that Bellamira might be swayed by the sight of him.
Ithamore’s seduction of Bellamira in 4.2 draws attention to the comic
disparity between Bellamira’s admiration of her lover’s physical appear-
ance and its actual offensiveness. If, as Phyllis Rackin has discussed,
Shakespeare’s sonnets parody the Petrarchan tradition with the the-
matic insistence that the young man “copy” himself by having children,
Bellamira’s courtship revolves around the unspoken assumption that
Ithamore’s sexual reproduction is precisely to be avoided.40 Although
it is difficult to know whether Ithamore was played in blackface, the
humor of the scene and the physical spectacle of the pair’s interactions
may suggest a debasement and dirtiness manifested in terms of a color
distinction. Bellamira and Ithamore kiss and embrace several times,
after which Ithamore remarks in an aside, “Now am I clean, or rather
foully, out of the way . . . I’ll go steal some money from my master, to
make me handsome” (4.2.46–8). As Bevington and Rasmussen’s gloss
suggests, Ithamore “plays with the paradox of clean and foul,” simul-
taneously invoking the use of burnt cork or other substance to blacken
the actor’s face and the trope of washing the blackamoor white.
Clearly parodying the courtly love conventions of pastoral lyric and
romance, Ithamore’s protracted declaration of love resembles Soliman’s
hyperbolic veneration of Perseda in Kyd’s play: “we will leave this
paltry land,” he declares,
And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece.

I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;
Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurled,
And Bacchus’ vineyards overspread the world,
Where woods and forests go in goodly green,
I’ll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love’s queen.
The meads, the orchards, and the primrose lanes,
Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes.
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love. (4.2.88–98)
As in Kyd’s play, the humor of the speech relies on the visual disso-
nance between what the audience sees and what it hears. In addition,
Ithamore’s particular appropriation of classical mythology conveys
the dual irony of both the lover’s and the beloved’s unworthiness. His
reference to Bellamira as “the golden fleece,” which Jason and the
Argonauts retrieved after overcoming many great dangers, is humor-
ous precisely because Bellamira is a prostitute and the “dangers” that
Ithamore overcomes to win her consist of extorting money from his
Jewish master. Shakespeare both reinforces and offers a variation on
Marlowe’s use of this classical allusion in his slightly later Merchant
of Venice, when Bassanio compares Portia’s suitors to “many Jasons
[who] come in quest of her” (1.1.172)41: Bassanio’s own economic
incentives to win Portia align him with Ithamore, whereas his and
Portia’s shared nobility and fairness sharply distinguish their union
from that of Ithamore and Bellamira.
In his prayer to “Dis above,” Ithamore reveals a worldview charac-
terized by up-is-down reversal that reflects his inversion of social codes
and his incongruity as a great epic hero. His prayer suggests a reversed
cosmology, possibly reflecting his distorted worldview as a Muslim
who worships the devil or anti-Christ in the form of Muhammad. In
addition, his description of Bellamira as his “golden fleece” may refer-
ence the exclusive knightly Order of the Golden Fleece, suggesting that
by wearing Bellamira as his badge of membership, he gains admittance
to this prestigious European Order. Ithamore’s status as a slave with no
core loyalties and Bellamira’s as a prostitute who will sell her affections
for money also evoke the fungible allegiances of Christian renegades
who turn Turk to suit their own interests rather than endure the dif-
ficulties of resistance. The play’s oblique suggestion that Ithamore may
be a native Thracian converted to Islam, rather than a native Muslim,
further aligns him with the figure of the spineless renegade whose sub-
mission to conversion was often understood as a voluntary form of
enslavement.
The sexual relationship between Ithamore and Bellamira reflects the
exploitative power dynamics that characterize political alliances in the
play. Bellamira seduces Ithamore in order to exploit his relationship
to Barabas, her pimp Pilia-Borza exploits her in turn, and Ithamore
betrays his alliance with Barabas in order to sleep with Bellamira. These
layers of exploitation further reflect upon the perversity of their union,
the extent to which it dishonors and disempowers all parties, and its
singular orientation around monetary gain. On the one hand, their
mutual debasement reduces the stakes of their union by translating
their courtship into low comedy. But, on the other hand, the use of
comedy to defuse the seriousness of this sexual union also betrays its
dangerous and transgressive associations. Ithamore’s speech is laden
with sexual and reproductive suggestions: his comparison of Bellamira
to the fecund and sensual “mead,” “orchards,” and “primrose lanes,”
which “instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes,” suggests a move-
ment from island to mainland, from the reproduction of marginal
plants along the shoreline to that of ripe fruits that grow inland and
tropical sugar-canes associated with Africa, China, and the West
Indies. As Stevie Simkin observes, Ithamore’s reference to Bacchus
“conjures up images of debauchery rather than tender love,” and in
place of the marbled whiteness of Adonis we are forced to substitute the
Turk.42 The Muslim slave’s projection of himself as plunderer and the
European Bellamira as ripe colonial fruit conjures a disturbing image of
subjugation. What cannot be imagined in serious terms without engen-
dering irrevocable tragic consequences becomes an easily dismissed
scene of comic release. And yet as I go on to show, its hints of the taboo
function somewhat like the hovering reproductive threats that link all
five of the early modern plays I discuss in this chapter. While The Jew of
Malta does not privilege sexual chastity as the other plays do, it repre-
sents Turkish imperialism in not just political but bodily terms. In turn,
the debased sexual union between Ithamore and Bellamira throws into
relief the strategic alliance between Ferneze and del Bosco that guards
against such unnatural alliances.
Placing The Jew of Malta in relation to the other Knight of Malta
plays enables a broader view of Ferneze and del Bosco’s alliance than
an isolated reading of the play permits, exposing this alliance both as
an object of critique and as something more complicated. The shifting
alliances that develop in the final scene reveal the imaginative limits
of acceptable and unacceptable Christian alliance. At the outset of the
scene, Ferneze feigns alliance with Barabas in order to capture Calymath
the Turk, but at the last minute he spares Calymath so as to catch
Barabas in his own trap. Thus, Ferneze’s defeat of Barabas compels a
startling truce between the Maltese and the Turks that replicates the
Turkish-Maltese league from the start of the play, but also gives the
Maltese the advantage. Extending a proverbial hand to Calymath,
Ferneze explains, “Thus [Barabas] determined to have handled thee
/ But I have rather chose to save thy life” (5.5.92–3). Ferneze has
effectively disposed of the Jew and extended Christian mercy to the
Turk; however, the play cannot leave things here and still deliver a
comic Christian resolution. The alignment between generic form and
Christian victory reveals the limits of Christian mercy with respect to
the Turks as well as the irrevocably tragic consequences associated with
Turkish imperialism.
Of course, as the 1633 title page indicates, The Jew of Malta was
classified as a tragedy at the time of its first printing, or more specifically
as “The famous tragedy of the rich Jew of Malta.” By extension, one
might see how the “tragedy” of a Jewish protagonist secured a comic
triumph for the opposing Christians. But clearly the generic affiliations
of this play also exceed the two sides of this binary opposition. As I
have shown, the threat of the Turks adds another layer of opposition
that frames Christian-Jewish opposition, just as the Maltese-Spanish
alliance frames Christian-Turk opposition. The complex ways in which
the play interrelates alliances and oppositions, tragedy and comedy,
ensures that any resolution is at best equivocal. In this sense, the play
is perhaps most accurately understood as an early form of tragicom-
edy. As Zachary Lesser has recently suggested, plays that endorse a
“paradoxical mixture” of political positions so as to support two sides
of an argument are particularly suited to the peculiar form of tragi-
comedy.43 Although The Jew of Malta’s earliest performances predate
the more overt and steady production of tragicomedies that began in
the 1620s – which included The Knight of Malta, The Devil’s Law-
case, and The Maid of Honor – it may be seen to presage these tragi-
comic structures through its startling reversals as well as its political
equivocation about Christian alliance.
One way that the final scene illustrates both reversal and equivoca-
tion is through its emphasis on securing Malta’s “freedom” from the
Turk. In this scene, Barabas first tempts Ferneze into an alliance by
emphasizing the promise of freedom: “Nay, do thou this, Ferneze,
and be free / . . . Here is my hand that I’ll set Malta free. / . . . And I
will warrant Malta free for ever” (5.2.90, 95, 101). His ironic sugges-
tion that an alliance with the treacherous Jew will set Malta “free”
only drives home the point that true freedom constitutes an impos-
sibility for Malta.44 By depicting Ferneze’s options as a choice among
two imperial alliances, the play exposes how political sovereignty
and autonomy are always compromised within an imperial frame-
work. Thus, when Ferneze stands beside del Bosco after defeating
Calymath and announces triumphantly that “Malta shall be freed,” he
resignifies “freedom” to accommodate a preferable imperial alliance
(5.5.112). While certainly this allusion to Malta’s freedom is nearly
as equivocal as the first, it secures the one thing about which the play
will not equivocate. Whereas it is possible to imagine a comic Christian
resolution in which Malta allies with Spain, it is simply not possible to
do so if the Knights “be in League with Turks.”
The Knight of Malta: Pan-Christian Alliance and Sexual Chastity
The Turkish siege of Malta again became a subject for the English
stage approximately thirty years later in John Fletcher, Nathan Field,
and Philip Massinger’s The Knight of Malta (c.1618).45 Performed in
the middle of King James’s reign, this play’s portrayal of the Knights
of Malta as a heroic alliance of Christian nations reflects a significant
shift from The Jew of Malta’s skepticism about pan-Christian alli-
ance. In this, it may be seen to accord with the political policies of King
James, discussed in my previous chapter in relation to The Renegado,
which included an openness to alliance with Catholic Spain in combi-
nation with a reinvigorated sense of animosity against the Ottoman
Turks.46 In addition to fostering the possibility of a royal match
between England and Spain, as well as that of military alliance against
the Ottoman empire, James’s position manifested itself in a via media,
or middle way, between Rome and Geneva, between Catholicism and
strict Reform Protestantism.
To some extent all three of the Jacobean plays I discuss in the second
half of this chapter may be seen to endorse James’s embrace of a via
media. Performed within five years of one another, these plays effect
the theatrical return of the Knights of Malta after nearly thirty years of
absence since The Jew of Malta. The plays’ renewed interest in redeem-
ing the Knights reflects a reanimated cultural desire for a model of pan-
Christian alliance against the Turkish threats of imperialism and piracy,
as well as a political climate that made it possible to view Protestants
and Catholics united in this heroic fellowship. The Knight of Malta
demonstrates James’s via media through its wholly positive portrayal of
a Spanish protagonist, a candidate for induction into the Order, which
is also portrayed as an honorable and sacred institution. In addition,
the play’s reclamation of the Knight’s vow of celibacy arguably reflects
Jacobean concessions toward Catholic traditions. However, I want to
argue that these apparent concessions are inextricable from the con-
comitant threat of the Turk, which signified not merely as an imperial
and piratical threat but also as an embodied threat with reproductive
and proto-racial implications.
Whereas The Jew of Malta reimagines the 1564 Turkish siege of
Malta to expose the costs of Christian fellowship and its underlying
commercial motivations, The Knight of Malta appropriates the histori-
cal circumstances of the siege to shore up the bonds of the Christian
fellowship modeled by the Knights of Malta. The play defines these
bonds and the values they represent by staging the exposure and
expulsion of a villainous Knight and a contest to select an honorable
replacement. Both of these challenges hinge on the necessity of policing
male chastity and thus interpret the safeguarding of the fellowship in
purely sexual terms. The Knight of Malta thus makes explicit what is
primarily an implicit connection between the Turkish threat to Malta
and the sexual contamination of the Christian body in The Jew of
Malta. In dramatizing a contest of sexual restraint between two gentle-
men for their induction into the Order, the play underscores the vow of
chastity as an absolute requirement for joining the Order. Similarly, in
expelling a villainous Knight who has broken his vow, the play repairs
a vulnerable link in the fellowship that threatens to compromise or
contaminate it. In doing so, it refigures the Christian military defense
of Malta by displacing the threat of Muslim conquest by that of an
internal blight upon the Christian fellowship itself. As with the Turkish
threat to Cyprus in Othello, the danger of a military attack on Malta is
contained by the beginning of Act Two, leaving the rest of the play to
deal with a domestic crisis that emerges in its absence. Thus, Christian
triumph is not so much a matter of protecting the island from the Turks
as of restoring the sanctity of the Order that defends it, by flushing out
a polluting force from within its ranks.
The play tests, purges, and refortifies the male fellowship of
Knights by employing three different externally marked heroines: a fair
Christian virgin, a light-skinned Turkish captive, and a dark-skinned
Moorish villain. As I discuss in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of
this book, skin color was just one of many potential indications of
an emerging sense of racial difference in the early modern period, but
it was also unique in that it constituted an outward distinction that
was understood in terms of both environmental effects and biological
inheritance. The Knight of Malta is striking for its direct linking of
skin color with biological inheritance managed through sexual repro-
duction. Its three physically marked protagonists police the sexual
behavior of the male fellowship of Knights by modeling lessons about
rape, consensual sex, the virtues of celibacy, and the dangers of sleep-
ing with the enemy. Moreover, the play both implicitly and explicitly
expresses the consequences of male sexual behavior through a logic and
rhetoric of reproduction. In punishing the expelled Knight by forcing
him to marry the dark-skinned Moor, the play directly associates the
consequences of dishonorable sexual behavior with interracial cou-
pling. Thus, while male chastity functions partly as sign of Christian
gentility, temperance, and restraint, it is also associated with the practi-
cal regulation of sexual reproduction.
The polluting force within the Order is embodied by an evil French
Knight named Mountferrat, whose opening soliloquy reveals his dishon-
orable intentions toward the Christian heroine, Oriana. Mounteferrat’s
villainy is suggested not only by his desire to seduce a virtuous woman
but by his savage resolution to force her submission:
Dares she despise me thus? Me that with spoile
And hazardous exploits, full sixteene yeeres
Have led (as hand-maides) Fortune, Victory,
Whom the Maltezi call my servitors?
...
The wages of scorn’d Love is banefull hate,
And if I rule not her, I’le rule her fate. (1.1.1–4; 25–6)47
His faulty assumption that his “sixteene yeeres” success “with spoile
/ And hazardous exploits” earn him the right to possess Oriana illus-
trates the play’s insistence that just as honorable crusading goes hand in
hand with honorable romantic seduction, so do dishonorable conquest
and the forceful subjugation of a woman. In turn, the play associates
virtuous masculinity with the ability to win a woman’s consent, and
distinguishes the best men through their subtle capacity to discern a
woman’s virtue even after her reputation has been tarnished. After
being rejected by Oriana, Mountferrat attempts to frame her for
treason by accusing her of a love affair with the basha of Tripoli that
will help facilitate an Ottoman invasion. Her exoneration reveals the
heroism of a Spaniard named Peter Gomera, as well as aligning Oriana
with other Christian women falsely accused of sexual infidelity, includ-
ing Desdemona in Othello, Alizia in A Christian Turned Turke, and
Paulina in The Renegado. Like these other heroines, Oriana clings to a
narrative of martyrdom. When charged before her brother, the Maltese
Grand Master, and sentenced to death, she responds, “I die a martyr
then, and a poor maid, / Almost yfaith as inocent as borne” (1.3.173–
4). Although she has no “proof” of her innocence, her transcendent
virtue convinces Gomera to rise up in her defense and challenge her
accuser to a duel. Thus, her fate differs from that of the other perse-
cuted heroines because she has the right man to defend her. In turn,
Gomera’s ability to perceive her innocence reveals his inherent honor.
The contest between Gomera and an Italian gentleman named
Miranda for induction into the Order consists not of hostile compe-
tition but of self-sacrifice and a recognition of their shared alliance
against the Turkish enemy. After Gomera challenges Mountferrat
to settle the question of Oriana’s innocence, Miranda worries that
Gomera’s advanced age could cause him to lose the duel, and tricks
Mountferrat into letting him fight in his place. Concealing his true
identity under Mountferrat’s armor, Miranda then loses on purpose
in order to ensure Gomera’s victory and Oriana’s release from a sen-
tence of death. This example of vindicating a woman’s honor through
masculine self-sacrifice stands in stark contrast to Erastus’s duel in
Soliman and Perseda, which leads Erastus to kill his own Christian
countryman and seek refuge in the Turkish court. One might note too
that Gomera and Miranda’s duel refigures the suitors’ duel in The Jew
of Malta, which also leads to tragic consequences for two Christian
suitors. Whereas Barabas orchestrates the violent opposition between
Mathias and Lodowick, Miranda orchestrates a feigned opposition that
uses the pretense of the duel to bolster the suitors’ common Christian
cause. In addition to modeling a pan-Christian alliance, Miranda and
Gomera’s duel exemplifies masculine virtue through physical restraint
rather than violent conquest.48
Above all, the contest between Miranda and Gomera for induction
into the Order is determined by their mutual struggle to overcome
carnal temptations. Both men are distinguished by the same set of pre-
requisite qualities that make them good candidates for Knighthood. As
the Maltese Grand Master attests, they are “royally descended,”
“valiant as war,” and for “full ten years . . . have serv’d this Island,
[and] perfected exploits / Matchles, and infinite” (1.3.16–20). However,
the play suggests that the true test of their fitness for the Order involves
not these military and class-related qualifications, but their ability to
maintain the vow of chastity. At first both Miranda and Gomera plead
general unworthiness for the honor of knighthood, but it soon becomes
clear that the real reason for their hesitancy is their mutual love for the
same woman Mountferrat desires. In posing the question of their fitness
for the Order, the play emphasizes their readiness or not to undertake
the vow of celibacy. For example, Gomera initiates a protracted dia-
logue with the Grand Master that cycles through a sequence of possible
reasons for his exclusion before zeroing in on the precise reason: “none
but a Gentleman / Can be admitted” (1.3.93–4), “no married man”
(1.3.96), “none that hath been contracted” (1.3.97), “none that ever
/ Hath vowed his love to any woman kinde” (1.3.99), “or finds that
secret fire within his thoughts” (1.3.100). Gomera’s guilt of the final
possibility – harboring “secret fire” or love for Oriana – ultimately
excludes him from the Order but wins him a wife, since he lays claim to
Oriana before Miranda does.
Determining that Gomera shall marry Oriana while Miranda pursues
a path to a higher “Mistreese,” the Maltese Grand Master, Valetta,
describes service to the Order as a variation on heterosexual marriage
and reproduction:
I have provided
A better match for you, more full of beauty:
I’le wed ye to our Order: there’s a Mistresse,
Whose beauty ne’re decayes: time stands below her:
Whose honour Ermin-like, can never suffer
Spot, or black soyle; whose eternall issue
Fame brings up at her breasts, and leaves ’em sainted.
Her you shall marry. (2.5.193–200)
His description of marriage to the Order invokes the metaphor of
Christ as bridegroom and the church as bride, which are the terms
used to describe a man’s entrance into the priesthood. Valetta empha-
sizes that this bride, a distinctly Catholic Order, will never “decaye”
or “suffer / Spot, or black soyle,” thus inverting Protestant charges
against the Catholic church that emphasize its moral decay. Further, he
declares that the offspring, or “issue,” from a Knight’s marriage to the
Order will be nurtured at the “breasts” of “fame” and will gain immor-
tality through sainthood. This non-sexual production of saints stands
in contrast to the sexual reproduction of mortal and sinful bodies, even
as it evokes the denigrated Catholic practice of reproducing idols and
relics. Ironically, it is the Spaniard, from the greater Catholic enemy to
England than is Italy, who is destined for the more Protestant path of
heterosexual marriage in this play. This flattering portrayal seems pos-
sible only in light of James’s ecumenical goodwill toward Spain, an alli-
ance pressured by the Muslim enemy and not uncontroversial. Bertha
Hensman has argued that the play’s depiction of Gomera was intended
to flatter the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who visited England in
September of 1618 and may have attended the first performance.49 It
is also possible that Gomera’s marriage to Oriana was intended to
convey support for a Spanish match, which James had already begun to
consider by 1618.
At the same time, the play reserves the possibility of the more heroic
honor of Knighthood for Miranda. It builds suspense around the ques-
tion of whether he will be inducted by drawing out his struggles to
overcome the temptations of women. First, the Turkish captive Lucinda
requests to meet Miranda and is initially denied by a friend who
attempts to protect Miranda’s interests. Angelo, a former Christian
slave to the Turks who is rescued along with Lucinda, explains to her,
You are a woman of a tempting beauty,
And he, however virtuous, is a man
Subject to human frailties; and how far
They may prevaile upon him, should he see you,
He is not ignorant: and therefore chooses,
With care t’avoyd the cause that may produce
Some strange effect, which wil not well keep ranck
With the rare temperance, which is admired
In his life hitherto. (3.3.14–22)
Implicit in this explanation is the sense that Lucinda’s foreignness

makes her a rare temptation who could produce a “strange effect”
capable of disturbing Miranda’s “rare temperance.” The extent of
Miranda’s “human frailties” and the uncertainty of his chastity are
revealed when he later succumbs to his desire to meet Lucinda and is
overcome by her beauty. His loss of self-control reveals the delicate line
between honorable mastery and dishonorable possession.
The play’s interest in testing Miranda’s suitability not only as a
defender of Malta but as an honorable conqueror is revealed through
Lucinda’s commendation of her Christian enslavers, whose civil treat-
ment of her bespeaks their potential for honorable conquest. Whereas
she expected her loss of liberty to be nothing but a “heavy and sharpe
burden,” she is pleasantly surprised to be met instead with “all content
and goodnesse” (3.4.36, 42). She explains, “Civility and sweetnesse of
behavior / Dwell about me; therefore, worthy Master / I cannot say I
grieve my liberty” (3.4.43–5). But Miranda finds himself so beguiled
by Lucinda that he at first fails to uphold this standard of “civil-
ity.” He draws near her and whispers into her ear, “I must lie with
ye Lady” (3.4.74). He then asserts, “I would get a brave boy on thee,
/ A warlike boy,” and to Lucinda’s concern that such an act should
result in “ill Christians,” Miranda explains, “We’l mend ’em in the
breeding” (3.4.90–2). As Ania Loomba notes, Miranda’s implication
that “the children of Muslim women can be blanched of their inner
stain” through the penetrating seed of the Christian male reinforces a
colonial paradigm.50 However, Lucinda’s reference to “ill Christians”
also refers to the moral taint that would result from such an unchris-
tian act as rape. The Knight of Malta relies on male sexual restraint to
define a different model of Christian conquest. Rather than endorse a
model of colonial penetration, the play points to the benefits of physical
restraint, demonstrating a strategy of subjugation and containment that
avoids self-contamination.
Ultimately, Lucinda successfully tames Miranda’s advances with the
aid of a particular material sign that anchors his Christian identity. She
directs his attention to the “holy badge” upon his probationer’s robe,
which contains the cross, warning, “If ye touch me, / Even in the act,
ile make that crosse, and curse ye” (3.4.148–9). As we shall also see in
The Maid of Honor, the Knight’s distinctive costume provided a visual
cue for the honorable behavior he should uphold. It also signified the
collective unity of the original eight nations or langues of the Knights
of Malta, under their shared Christianity. William Segar in Honor,
military, and ciuill (1602) describes how the symbolic eight-pointed
cross originated with Pope Urban the second, who, during the Knights’
siege on Antioch, “sent vnto the Captaines a white Crosse, with com-
mandement that all the soldiers should weare the like.”51 Segar also
attributes the tradition to Gerard, often credited with founding the
Order, “who commanded that he, with all others of that house, should
Figure 4.3: Caravaggio, Knight of the Order of Malta (c.1608). Oil on canvas.
46 5/8 × 37 5/8 in. (118.5 × 95.5 cm). Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy.
Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.
weare a white Crosse vpon a blacke garment, which was the originall of
the Order, and euer since hath bene vsed.”52 Though England outlawed
the Knights’ apparel because of its Catholic associations in 1540, the
costume retained power for a long time. Clearly, the theater company
owned and reused – possibly shared? – this costume, exploiting its
continued authority and familiarity to English audiences. Lucinda’s
use of the figure of the cross exemplifies the stage’s reliance on material
objects and ritual performance to help sustain the immaterial principles
of faith and chastity. As Elizabeth Williamson has argued, though
crosses, as opposed to crucifixes, were not strictly forbidden by the
Reformation, their association with miraculous properties could easily
invoke the idolatrous use of Catholic crucifixes.53 Lucinda reaffirms
the magic-like power of the cross on Miranda’s badge by professing
its ability to “save in dangers,” “in troubles, comfort,” “in sicknesse,
restore health,” and “preserve from evils, that afflict our frailties”
(3.4.127–31). Thus confronted, Miranda relents: “Forgive me, heaven,
she sayes true” (3.4.137).
Later, the Christian Oriana also helps tame Miranda’s sexual desires
when he continues to pursue her even after his trial with Lucinda and
despite Oriana’s marriage to Gomera. Oriana uses a rhetoric of repro-
duction to distinguish the spiritual example generated by a chaste union
from the mortal offspring generated through sexual contact. When
Miranda begs her for a kiss, Oriana counsels him to “master” his desires
as she does her own and “Think on the legend which we two shall
breed” (5.1.70, 93). Her reference to the superiority of their chaste con-
nection and the offspring it will “breed” contrasts sharply with the “ill
Christians” that would come of Miranda’s forced union with Lucinda:
And in this pure conjunction we enjoy

A heavenlier pleasure then if bodies met:
This, this is perfect love: the other short
...
Nor is our spirituall love, a barren joy
For mark what blessed issue we’ll beget,
Deerer then children to posterity,
A great example to mens continence,
And womens chastity, that is a childe
More faire, and comfortable, then any heire. (5.1.122–4, 128–33)
By embracing such sentiments, Miranda overcomes the sexual tempta-

tions of both a fair Christian and a Muslim captive. In both cases, the
cultivation of honorable Christian masculinity relies on the more secure
virtue of a woman. Oriana associates celibacy not with “barreness” but
with a different kind of reproductive fertility – one that breeds not a
human child, but a narrative “example” or “legend” of chastity. In a
sense, this play and the next two I discuss in this chapter provide these
very “examples,” perpetuating with each retelling a reformed and hon-
orable reputation for the Knights of Malta. According to Oriana, the
“childe” of a chaste connection is even “more faire” and “comfortable”
than a biological “heire.” Her reference to the “faire” offspring ensured
by chaste behavior seems to refer more directly to general beauty than
to skin color; however, the play’s sustained interest in reproduction,
along with its attention to distinctions of skin color among its female
characters, suggests awareness of the reproductive consequences of
these distinctions.
In addition to setting the virtue of Gomera and Miranda in contrast
to Mountferrat, the play distinguishes Gomera and Miranda from
their Danish peer, Norandine, who is lauded for his military heroism
but who lacks gentility and chastity. Described in the play’s title page
(1647) as “a valiant merry Dane” and “Commander in chief of the
Gallies of Malta,” Norandine belongs in a class of uncouth renegade
heroes such as John Ward, Antonio Grimaldi, and Thomas Stukeley. As
he himself acknowledges, he has just enough “compunction of con-
science . . . to save [him], and that’s all” (5.2.65–6). Norandine asserts
that making him a Knight would require the Maltese to “make your
Captaines capons first,” for he professes to “have too much flesh for
this spirituall Knighthood” (5.2.68–9). In other words, he would need
to be castrated in order to live by the rules of the fellowship. His refer-
ence to the implicit contradiction of having “too much flesh” to join
a “spirituall” fellowship underscores the interdependency of spirit and
flesh that was perceived to characterize the Knights’ vows.
Norandine exemplifies his unfitness for honorable conquest through
his view that rape is an acceptable practice. After returning from
battle with the Turks, he takes inventory of the booty his men have
amassed and, after discovering the beautiful Turkish captive, Lucinda,
instructs his soldiers to “Share her among ye” (2.1.154). Later, he tells
Miranda that he would sleep better if he had “a kind wench / To pull
my Boot-hose off, and warm my night-cap” (3.4.12–13). His thoughts
immediately spiral back to Lucinda: “now I think on’t / Where is your
Turkish prisoner?” (3.4.16–17). She is spared from the “Souldiers wild-
nesse” only by virtue of her eloquent speech, which succeeds in taming
Norandine’s savagery (2.1.157). Lucinda’s patient rebuke counsels
Norandine about the difference between honorable conquest and dis-
honorable theft: “he that can conquer, / Should ever know how to pre-
serve his conquest, / Tis but a base theft else” (2.1.161–3). In drawing
an analogy between sexual and military conquest, the Turkish maid
coaches her captor and converts his sexual aggression into restraint.
Certainly, The Knight of Malta’s sexual rhetoric operates on a
metaphoric level, but I also want to suggest that it responds to literal
concerns about the reproductive consequences of Christian-Muslim
contact. In contrast to the fair Lucinda, whose Muslim difference can
be “mended in the breeding,” the play presents Zanthia, a “blacka-
moor” villainess who conspires with Mountferrat. The blackness of
her skin would have been visually obvious to audiences, but it is also
emphasized through repeated references. Mountferrat refers to her as
“my black cloud” (1.1.164), “my black swan” (1.1.190), and “hels
perfect character” (4.1.64), and Zanthia assures us that “No bath,
no blanching water, smoothing oyles / Doth mend me up” (1.1.179–
80). She is also persistently contrasted with the “white innocent sign”
of the magically charged Maltese cross, as well as with the “spot-
less white” attire worn by Oriana, who identifies it as “the emblem
of [her] life.” Defined against Christian purity, Zanthia’s blackness
makes her the perfect co-conspirator to Mountferrat’s crimes, a physi-
cal externalization of his internal blackness. Their conspiracy is also
sexual, in that Mountferrat sleeps with her in order to gain her trust
and assistance. When Mountferrat’s crimes are discovered at the end
of the play, the Grand Master punishes him not only by expelling him
from the Order, but by ordering him to marry Zanthia – a punishment
construed as worse than death. The Danish Norandine draws attention
to the reproductive implications of Mountferrat’s punishment when
he says, “Away French stallion, now you have a Barbary mare of your
own, go leap her, and engender young devillings” (5.2.279–80). Again,
improper masculine behavior toward a Muslim woman is expressed
in terms of undesirable reproductive consequences. Whereas Lucinda
helps to cultivate a model of European masculinity that can honor-
ably convert and redeem the colonized subject, Zanthia represents the
threat of moral and bodily contamination that results from masculine
behavior that is reckless, uncivil, and dishonorable.
In some ways, these two Islamic women serve similar functions in
the play, whereas in other ways their functions are oppositional. Both
serve in subjugated roles, Zanthia as servant to Oriana and later
to Mountferrat, and Lucinda as slave to Miranda. Gomera in fact
regrets that he cannot give Lucinda to Oriana “as companion to [her]
faithfull Moore” when he returns to Malta with the spoils of war
(3.2.80). His comparison of Zanthia and Lucinda obscures the gulf
that separates them. Lucinda is fair, whereas Zanthia is black; Lucinda
is a chaste virgin, whereas Zanthia is sexually promiscuous; and as
Bindu Malieckal has observed, Lucinda is convertible to Christianity,
whereas Zanthia is not.54 With the help of these two female foils, the
play fulfills two distinct imaginative agendas: that of gentle conquest
and conversion and that of resistance to moral and bodily foreign con-
tamination. In addition, these two Muslim women help to perform a
necessary maintenance of the Christian fellowship by facilitating the
expulsion of the sexually unrestrained Mountferrat and the induction
of the resolutely chaste Miranda. During his expulsion, Mountferrat
is condemned as “a rotten, / corrupted, and contagious member,”
and subjected to an elaborate undressing ceremony that involves the
untying of a knot, the removal of his cross, spurs, and sword, and the
hanging of a halter around his neck (5.2.214–15). Immediately after,
Miranda stands upon the same altar and receives the cross, publicly
proclaiming, “I vow henceforth a chaste life” (5.2.242). Importantly,
the reformation of Christian fellowship relies not on the cultivation
of a disembodied or spiritual faith, but on the enforcement of bodily
restraint through the Catholic vow of celibacy.
“Proof” of Noble Bloodlines in Webster’s The Devil’s Law-case
If The Jew of Malta implicitly links the stakes of pan-Christian alliance

to an embodied threat, and The Knight of Malta makes this connec-
tion explicit by illustrating the sexual and reproductive consequences
of the Knight’s broken vow of chastity, Webster’s The Devil’s Law-
case reveals the extent to which these embodied consequences were
informed by anxieties about bloodlines. As Jean Feerick has argued,
the significance of blood as a category proximate to social rank brings
into view a crucial discursive phase in the making of modern race.55 She
seeks to distinguish taxonomies of skin color from this more dominant
system of blood that anchored race in the early modern period, but
in doing so she also reveals how racial distinctions of skin color were
“predicated on and entangled with the decline” of blood as a system for
marking a heritable social hierarchy.56 Contemporary in performance
to The Knight of Malta, Webster’s play seems to capture the process
of transition between these two systems of race, revealing how social
hierarchies determined by bloodline were understood to be regulated
through sexual activity. The play problematizes the illegibility of blood-
lines and their vulnerability to contamination through two interrelated
plotlines. In the first, a greedy merchant who has impregnated a nun
convinces his virginal sister to feign pregnancy so that his own ille-
gitimate child will inherit the estates that have been willed to his sister
by two suitors. In the second, the merchant’s mother brings a lawsuit
against her son that accuses him of being the illegitimate product of
an affair, thus preventing him from claiming the inheritance left by his
actual father, now deceased. The play frames these two interrelated
plotlines within a larger context of eastern trade and Ottoman imperi-
alism that inform the anxieties about reproductive contamination and
legitimacy. In addition, its depiction of a contest between two Christian
suitors, one a Knight of Malta, models a lesson about pan-Christian alli-
ance that substitutes homosocial fellowship for heterosexual marriage.
Though set entirely in Naples and containing only Christian (implic-
itly Catholic) characters, The Devil’s Law-case repeatedly invokes a
broader context of global trade and Christian-Muslim warfare, involv-
ing failed investments in the East Indies, an expedition against the
Turks, and the climactic appearance of a blackface disguise. Revealed
in disjunctive and disturbing ways, this contextual frame crucially
informs the play’s thematization of anxieties about reproductive ille-
gitimacy. As Kim Hall has discussed, The Devil’s Law-case foregrounds
concerns over noble descent as a way of dramatizing anxieties about
England’s growing merchant class and its upward mobility – a develop-
ment framed by foreign trade and early colonial initiatives.57 In addi-
tion, as I argue, the play registers the vulnerability of noble bloodlines
not just to new forms of capital accumulation but to reproductive
manipulation and foreign contamination. The play’s commitment to
shoring up bloodlines against these particular threats starts to become
apparent through the complicated and unexpected ways that it con-
trasts Jolenta’s two suitors and resolves the contest between them. In
the opening scene Romelio, the greedy merchant – later identified more
specifically as an “East Indy Marchant” (4.2.80) – asserts his control
over his sister, Jolenta, and her choice of a husband in the absence of
their dead father.58 The two suitors are Ercole, a wealthy Knight of
Malta, and Contarino, who descends from a noble family but who has
sold most of his land to Romelio in order to generate enough income
to live.
Ultimately, the play subverts this economic opposition, replac-
ing the contest between suitors with a Christian homosocial alli-
ance. At first, Romelio’s self-serving preference for Ercole’s wealth over
Contarino’s noble descent sets up an expectation that Contarino will
triumph. Though Ercole also professes to descend from gentle breeding,
his wealth, given his profession as a Knight of Malta, would have been
associated with commercial and piratical activities. We also learn that
he received his Knighthood from the Spanish king, an association that
would have aroused suspicion in an English audience, despite Spain’s
authority within the play as the imperial ruler of Naples (also a contem-
porary fact). Ercole is further implicated as the wrong match for Jolenta
by the fact that Jolenta herself loves Contarino and suffers under her
brother’s oppressive preference for Ercole. However, the play proceeds
to thwart the expected comic resolution in which inherited nobility
and love triumph. For example, it begins to cast doubt on Contarino’s
motives and to signal Ercole’s redemption through his moral integ-
rity. But instead of ultimately matching Jolenta with Ercole, the play
displaces the anticipated heterosexual union altogether by a homosocial
bond between Contarino and Ercole. In addition, it uses the dissolution
of their contest to bring about a kind of redemption for both charac-
ters, who ultimately distinguish their shared heroism in opposition to
Romelio’s villainy. The concluding masculine alliance disrupts the pos-
sibility of heterosexual reproduction and demonstrates the advantage
of dissolving the class fracture between title and wealth so as to cement
a more essential alliance based on national and Christian interests.
The Devil’s Law-case deploys a duel – reminiscent of the self-
sacrificing duel between Perseda and Soliman, as well as the duel
between Miranda and Gomera in The Knight of Malta – in order to
reveal its protagonists’ heroism in unexpected ways. Agreeing to fight
for the right to Jolenta, Contarino and Ercole embrace, a gesture that
overtly signals their gentlemanly agreement, but covertly allows each to
determine whether the other is armed. The disingenuous embrace thus
signals their mutual distrust at the start of the play. But the duel ulti-
mately supplies a surprise twist in that both men suffer grave wounds
and collapse upon one another as “perfect lovers,” leading the others to
believe that they are both dead (2.2.41). In actuality, both Ercole and
Contarino survive their wounds, but their perceived deaths create an
opportunity for them to negotiate a different relationship to one another
and to discover a new masculine ideal that supersedes the competition
between suitors and transcends the binary opposition between money-
less nobility and ignoble wealth. The duel also redirects the energy in the
play by turning a contest of self-interest into one of self-sacrifice. When
Ercole rouses himself from his injuries to discover that he has miracu-
lously survived, he comes to the realization that he “has fought for one
[Jolenta], in whome I have no more right, / Than false executors have in
Orphan’s goods” (2.4.7–8). He then decides to preserve the rumor of his
own death so as to allow Contarino, whom he believes to be alive, “to
enjoy what is his owne” (2.4.20). Although the play does not explicitly
acknowledge the vow of celibacy that Ercole would have taken as a
Knight of Malta, it implicitly realigns him with this vow by redirecting
him away from marriage and toward a male alliance with Contarino – a
redirection the play presents as the proper course of events. In addition,
the false impression of their deaths enables Contarino and Ercole to
identify their common adversary as Romelio.
Although, as in Othello, the true villain in this play is a domestic
figure, in that he is Christian and a native of Naples, his villainy is
largely informed by his ties to eastern trade and colonization. When
Romelio learns that Jolenta stands to inherit the estates of both
Contarino and Ercole, he masterminds a plan to allow both himself and
his illegitimate offspring to benefit from the suitors’ apparent deaths
through a complex set of frauds and manipulations. However, the
tragic ending that Romelio threatens in this tragicomedy is ultimately
dictated by the fact that all his hopes and money are tied up in eastern
trade and investments. Early in the second act, Romelio receives news of
his tremendous losses in the East Indies, which motivate him to attempt
to capitalize on the deaths of his sister’s suitors. In addition, Romelio’s
refusal to pay a “yearely Custome” to the Spanish king makes him the
target of a Spanish spy. His attempts to act as a free agent put him in
breach of the imperial alliance between Spain and Naples – an act of
selfish independence that the play does not sanction. By associating
Romelio’s commercial activities with greed, risk, and secrecy, the play
disparages commercial intercourse in the East and West Indies and
sets it in opposition to anti-imperial warfare against Turkish forces in
the Mediterranean. Conversely, it works to redeem Ercole by playing
up his crusading role against the Turk and downplaying any associa-
tion he may have with commerce and colonialism. It is also significant
that the presence of the Turkish enemy makes an alliance with Spain
acceptable.
The temporary complications and solutions that ensue when Romelio
attempts to manipulate his sister into feigning a pregnancy reveal in
comic ways just how far appearances can stray from the truth when
it comes to forging lines of descent. Jolenta informs Romelio, dishon-
estly, that she is already pregnant with Contarino’s baby, thus adding
the specter of one too many babies. Romelio then reasons that they
can pretend she’s had twins, though, as Jolenta points out, the lie
might be exposed if the two children lack sufficient resemblance to one
another. Later, Contarino misunderstands Jolenta’s revelation that the
child is really Romelio’s, and assumes that Jolenta has been impregnated
by her own brother. Taking pleasure in how vulnerable bloodlines are
to manipulation, Romelio reflects with amusement on “how many
times ith world Lordships descend / To diverse men . . . for any thing
belongs to’th flesh, / As well to the Turkes richest Eunuch” (3.3.168–9,
171–2). Thus, in associating the indiscriminate fungibility of monetary
wealth with the universal pull of sexual desire and the impossibility of
policing or verifying sexual reproduction, the play suggests that blood-
lines can be manipulated and faked to look legitimate. At the same
time, it denies this possibility by dramatizing the inevitable revelation of
the truth, a revelation that reinforces the association between anxieties
about bloodlines and foreign contamination.
If Romelio’s attempts to conceal the illegitimacy of his child are
ultimately thwarted, then so are his mother’s dishonest attempts to
dispute his legitimate lineage. Bringing a lawsuit that accuses him of
being a bastard, she attempts to deprive him of his name and nobility
by revealing that his true father was a Spanish houseguest who stayed
with her while her husband was traveling in France. She thus accuses
Romelio of possessing an illegitimate social status, “as if he bought his
Gentry from the Herauld, / With money got by extortion” (4.2.112–
13). Fortunately, the Spanish houseguest, Don Crispiano, turns out to
be present in the courtroom, for he is the same Spaniard sent by the
Spanish king to spy on Romelio. He proves the truth of Romelio’s legit-
imate descent by repeatedly drawing attention to the year of Romelio’s
conception – 1571 – which Crispiano identifies as the year of the battle
of Lepanto, and recalls that during this momentous Christian victory
over the Turks, he was in the Indies and decidedly not in Naples. In
thus proving that Romelio is the legitimate heir to the family fortune,
the play shores up the integrity of Romelio’s noble descent and proves
that in fact bloodlines are not as vulnerable to manipulation as they
might appear. In the final analysis, lines of descent are rendered visible
and subject to proof.
Contemporary non-dramatic discussions of the Knights emphasize
how the criteria for joining the Order of the Knights addressed a par-
ticular concern for securing the purity of Christian bloodlines. Fuller’s
Historie of the holy warre stresses the restrictions on a Knight’s par-
entage: to join the Order, a man must be “at least 18 years of age; not
descended of Jewish or Turkish parents; no bastards unless bastard to a
prince, there being honor in that dishonor; and descended of worship-
ful parents.”59 Similarly, a much earlier text, Richard Jones’s Booke of
honor and armes (1590), lists these prerequisites: “proven gentilitie;
no man descended of a Moor, Jew, or Mahometan, even if descended
of a Prince”; “Diverse other Articles there bee, but for that they are full
of Superstition, I omit them.”60 William Segar’s Honor military, and
ciuill (1602) nearly replicates Jones’s language, excluding the descend-
ant of “a Moore, a Iew, or Mahometan” from the fellowship “although
he were the sonne of a Prince,” and omitting other articles “for that
they are full of superstition.”61 While Jones and Segar avoid naming
the vow of celibacy by couching it under Catholic “superstition,” they
insist, like Fuller, on the purity of the Christian bloodline. Edward
Grimstone’s The estates, empires, & principallities of the world (1615)
maintains that no bastards could become Knights, unless “descended
from some great family,” as well as “no man issued from a Iew, a
Marran, or a Mahometan, even were he the sonne of a prince,” and
he also excludes anyone “indebted or married.”62 Taken collectively,
these sets of criteria suggest that gentility trumps illegitimate parentage
but not religious difference: if gentility is a precondition for becoming
a Knight, it is possible to be a gentleman bastard but not a gentle-
man Turk. Indeed, the overlapping categories that implicitly come to
define a “gentleman” in the late sixteenth century – high birth, refined
manners, Christian bloodline – are reflected in the etymological links
between “gentle,” “genteel,” and “gentile.” Like The Devil’s Law-case,
these non-dramatic texts’ concern for controlling reproductive purity
betrays the interconnections between class, religious identity, manner,
and heritable distinctions.
Significantly, the nature of the proof that legitimizes Romelio depends
upon the audience’s familiarity with the historical battle of Lepanto to
mark the date, as well as an awareness of a larger world into which
Christians are displaced from their native lands. It is precisely because
Crispiano was engaged in East Indian trade – and thus physically
detached from Naples – that he could not have fathered Romelio. In
this way, the play assuages anxieties relating to cross-cultural contact
and reproductive contamination by using Crispiano’s foreign displace-
ment to detach him from the alleged site of sexual contact. The newly
forged alliance between Ercole and Contarino also becomes readable in
relation to a larger global context. On the one hand, their bond is con-
structed in opposition to Romelio’s villainy, but on the other hand, it
is constructed in relation to a larger enemy that Romelio helps to make
visible through his attempts to drive a wedge between the two suitors.
When Ercole charges Romelio with Contarino’s murder in court and
is questioned about the strange reversal of his former enmity toward
Contarino, Ercole replies,
Tis true: but I begun to love him,
When I had most cause to hate him, when our bloods
Embrac’d each other, then I pitied,
That so much valour should be hazarded
On the fortune of a single Rapier,
And not spent against the Turke. (4.2.597–602)
Almost as inexplicable as Crispiano’s invocation of the battle of
Lepanto, Ercole’s reference to the “Turke,” who dissolves conflicts
between Christian enemies, calls attention to the larger context of
Christian-Muslim conflict that frames the play. In response, Contarino
speaks up in support of Ercole, though he wears the disguise of a
“Dane” to conceal his identity. When Ercole responds, “Sir, I doe not
know you” (4.2.611), Contarino replies, “Yes, but you have forgot
me, you and I have sweat / In the Breach together at Malta” (4.2.612–
13). While clearly not literal in nature, this explanation draws attention
to the greater “breach” that divides Christian strangers from a common
Muslim enemy.
The new lines of alliance that are drawn in this play construct a
new standard for “nobility” and complicate assumptions about noble
versus non-noble bloodlines. Even as Romelio’s nobility is legitimized,
his villainy illustrates how a noble bloodline is not necessarily linked
to noble conduct. Thus, while the play shores up the readability of
bloodlines, it refuses to essentialize them. Instead, it negotiates a new
definition of genteel behavior that is not contingent on inherited nobil-
ity. For example, Ercole exhibits genteel behavior in a way that tran-
scends the logic of reproductive descent when he learns of Jolenta’s
pregnancy. Accused of fathering the child (and knowing that he could
not have), Ercole surmises that the baby must be Contarino’s and
resolves to accept it as his own. He reasons, “There never was a way
more honourable, / To exercise my vertue, then to father it, / And pre-
serve her credit, and to marry her” (3.3.335–7). Ironically, Romelio’s
attempt to manipulate lineage through Jolenta’s feigned pregnancy
creates an opportunity for the Knight of Malta to demonstrate honor
through claiming a child who is not his own descendant. At the same
time, while this gentility may dissolve distinctions of nobility among
Christians, it finds its limits outside of the Christian fold – a point finally
driven home by the disturbing specter of Jolenta’s transformation into
a Moor.
The reconciliation between Ercole and Contarino also posits a rela-
tionship that supersedes the bonds of lineage but that is forged in alli-
ance against the Muslim foe. In the final scene, the two men embrace
for a second time in the play, this time replacing their former suspicion
with a genuine show of affection. Ercole declares, “You were but now
my second, now I make you / My selfe forever,” thus concluding a
play that began as a marriage plot with a homosocial union between
two men who were at first differentiated by social status (5.6.27). The
judge’s final sentence, in which he orders Contarino, Ercole, and
Romelio to embark for sea and commit seven years to fighting the
Turks, reinforces the larger significance of Ercole’s and Contarino’s
alliance. In addition to forestalling the possibility of heterosexual
reproduction, this resolution underscores the importance of dissolving
disputes and distinctions among Christian men – their Catholicism and
Spanish ties notwithstanding – in order to create a united front against
the Turkish enemy. In turn, the three female protagonists (Jolenta,
Leonora, and the pregnant nun) are ordered to remain at home to build
a monastery. Thus, by relying on Catholic institutions that enforce
sexual separation and celibacy, the comic resolution of marriage is
postponed in order to attend to the more pressing business of cementing
a Christian crusade against the Turks.
The larger context of interreligious and interracial conflict that
frames this play is most pointedly revealed through Jolenta’s shocking
use of a blackface disguise in the final scene to prove her innocence
of sexual defilement. According to the stage direction, she enters
the courtroom with “her face colour’d like a Moor.” Ironically, the
outward transformation of her appearance is intended to provide proof
that her virtue and bloodline remain untainted, her body devoid of a
pregnancy. Though she contends that “the Downe upon the Ravens
feather / Is as gentle and as sleeke, / As the Mole on Venus cheeke,” her
point in putting on blackface is that her whiteness is so secure that it
transcends the outward appearance of blackness (5.6.41–3). Gesturing
to the pregnant nun, she asks, “Which of us now judge you whiter, /
Her whose credit proves the lighter, / Or this blacke, and Ebon hew,
/ That unstain’d, keeps fresh and true” (5.6.50–3). In demonstrating
the potential for appearances to deceive, she proposes the power of
her innocence and virtue to transcend legal proofs and appearances. In
turn, Ercole immediately recognizes her true identity as Jolenta, exem-
plifying the Knight’s ability to discern a virtuous woman even when
outward evidence suggests the contrary.
Although Jolenta’s intention is to illustrate her unscathed and virgin-
ally intact body, the fact that her “proof” invokes a figure of interracial
contact acknowledges a world beyond the domestic sphere of Naples
that supplies its worst fear of sexual contamination. In this context,
Moorish blackness functions as a figure for sexual sin and reproduc-
tive contamination. Given the setting of the play in a Spanish territory,
the history of the Moorish invasion of Spain offers a specific resonance
of genetic anxiety. As Barbara Fuchs has discussed, the expulsion of
the Moriscoes from Spain (1609–14) “attempted nothing less than to
cleanse Spain finally and completely of the Moorish taint.”63 Spain’s
infamous blood purity statutes excluding descendants of Moors and
Jews from positions of power within civil and religious institutions also
“loomed large in the culture’s imagination.”64 Unexpected and yet not
quite unimaginable in the Naples courtroom, the Moorish disguise reg-
isters the potential for intercultural contamination and miscegenation
that hovers around the play. The domestic disputes at the center of The
Devil’s Law-case become fully intelligible only when read within a frame
of East Indian trade, the battle of Lepanto, Moorish invasion, and the
continuing Christian crusade against the Turks. The fact that Jolenta’s
particular disguise serves as a visual analogy of the various attempts
throughout the play to fake or conceal legitimate bloodlines reveals
what is at stake in pinning down the illegibility of bloodlines. Certainly
on some level, the play’s anxieties about illegitimacy have to do with
the destabilization of class status and the undermining of noble blood-
lines such as Contarino’s by wealthy corsairs like Ercole. But I also
want to suggest that Jolenta’s embodiment of Moorish blackness as a
sign for the reproductive vulnerability of bloodlines is not distinct from
these class anxieties, that in the mercantile and imperial world of this
play, class and racial anxieties constitute two sides of the same coin. In
another sense, the Moorish specter embodies the links between blood
as rank and blood as race, which are fused by commerce and imperial-
ism. The Knight’s vow of celibacy, I further argue, presents one way
of addressing the dual anxieties of rank and race. Ercole’s vow, which
is implicitly preserved through the disruption of the marriage plot,
thus functions as a corollary to Jolenta’s use of a Moorish disguise to
“prove” her virginity, and by extension her nobility, her whiteness, and
her untainted bloodline.
Philip Massinger, The Maid of Honor: Masculinity Redeemed
First performed around 1621–2 by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the

Phoenix, Massinger’s The Maid of Honor recenters the question of
the Knight’s redemption on the vow of chastity. In doing so, it thwarts
the generic association between comedy and marriage and departs in
pointed ways from its sources. At the same time, it illustrates how the
recuperation of this Catholic vow is shaped by particular historical
circumstances that elevate masculine fellowship over marriage and
resignify the function of chastity as protection against sexual and racial
contamination. In employing a virtuous heroine who supplies a model
for masculine reform and resecuring a pan-Christian alliance between
two Knights, the play clearly cites the earlier plays discussed in this
chapter. In particular, The Maid of Honor may be viewed as a rejoinder
to Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, illustrating the successful redemption of
an errant Knight of Malta through his recognition of his national obli-
gations and his renewal of his vow of celibacy. However, this play also
extends the function of the Knight’s redemption into an imperializing
context by depicting its hero as an invader rather than the subject of a
country being invaded.
Although The Maid of Honor is set in Sicily, where the Knights of
Malta briefly settled before taking over Malta in 1530, it dramatizes
a fictional set of historical circumstances. The plot involves a military
effort led by a Sicilian Knight of Malta, named Bertoldo, to aid the
duke of Urbino in an attack against Siena. The king of Sicily, who is
Bertoldo’s brother, refuses to support the plan because it endangers a
truce between Sicily and Siena, but he allows Bertoldo to assemble a
band of volunteers to supplement Urbino’s forces. When Siena prevails
and Bertoldo is taken captive, the king refuses to ransom his brother. A
virtuous Sicilian maid, Camiola, takes mercy on Bertoldo and offers
him a marriage contract, including “two parts of [her] estate,” that
will supply his ransom (3.3.195).65 Bertoldo fails to honor the con-
tract when he receives a more advantageous offer to marry Aurelia,
the duchess of Siena, who promises to smooth over his rift with his
brother Roberto and reseal the alliance between Sicily and Siena. The
comic denouement is achieved when Camiola orders Bertoldo to court
to make good on his marriage contract and then unexpectedly releases
him from the obligation, shaming him into repentance. In doing so, she
draws attention to the disjuncture between her expectation of him as a
noble and virtuous gentleman and the reality of his ingratitude and lack
of honor. In the end, Bertoldo redeems himself by re-embracing his vow
of celibacy, and Camiola, having sacrificed herself for his redemption,
decides to enter the nunnery.
Aligning comedy with celibacy rather than marriage, the play’s
peculiar resolution is foreshadowed in the first act when Bertoldo
proclaims his love for Camiola and she rebukes him, saying, “Alas Sir,
/ We are not parallels, but like lines divided / Can nere meete in one
Centre” (1.2.120–2). Echoing Perseda’s rebuke of Soliman (“Solimans
thoughts and mine resemble / Lines parallel that neuer can be ioyned”),
as we saw above, Camiola speaks not of an interreligious distinction
barring her marriage to Bertoldo, but of a distinction dictated by the
laws of their shared religion. Answering Bertoldo’s objection that “no
disparatie” exists between them, since Camiola is “an heyre / Sprung
from a noble familie, faire, rich, young, / And every way my equall”
(1.2.137–40), Camiola explains:
Religion stops our Entrance, you are Sir
A Knight of Malta, by your Order bound
To a single life, you cannot marrie me,
And I assure my selfe you are too noble
To see me (though my frailtie should consent)
In a base path. (2.1.146–51)
Camiola thus elevates the Knight’s vow of chastity to a position where
its transgression would be akin to marrying outside of one’s faith, class,
or social station. By drawing attention to her own female “frailty,” she
also appears to lay the onus on Bertoldo to maintain this vow. Thus,
in contrast to the earlier Soliman and Perseda, the lesson of virtue
and chastity that Camiola models is explicitly transferred to the male
protagonist.
Although one might presume that the play will find a way around
the religious obstacle that stands between these otherwise well-suited
lovers, Camiola forecloses this possibility by aligning Bertoldo’s vow
with God’s will, which cannot be transgressed without tragic repercus-
sions. When Bertoldo suggests that a “dispensation” would “easiely
absolve” him of his orders, Camiola rebukes him in a way that suggests
the impossibility of absolution and the irreversibility of his Catholic
vow (1.2.151–2):
Camiola: O take heed Sir,

When, what is vowed to heaven, is dispens’d with,
To serve our ends on earth, a curse must follow,
And not a blessing.
Bertoldo: Is there no hope left me?
Camiola: Nor to my selfe, but is a neighbour to
Impossibility: true love should walke
On equall feete, in us it does not Sir.
Bertoldo: And this is your
Determinate sentence?
Camiola: Not to be revok’d. (1.2.152–61)
Thus, the play sets out as a challenge the possibility of revoking

Camiola’s “determinate sentence,” but also stipulates that such a
reversal could only be followed by a “curse.” Whereas other comedies
would find a creative way around the curse, this play insists that the
Knight’s Catholic vow cannot be compromised without leading to
tragedy. Indeed, as the tragicomic plot unfolds, we see that the tragedy
very narrowly averted is in fact marriage. Ultimately, The Maid of
Honor moves beyond the tragic ending of Soliman and Perseda pre-
cisely because Bertoldo is able to reconcile himself to a life of chastity
in the fifth act: he is successfully redeemed.
If in some ways The Maid of Honor brings the tragic lessons of
Soliman and Perseda full circle, it also revises the earlier play’s pre-
scription for masculine heroism through its response to a different set
of political conditions. Whereas Soliman and Perseda may be seen to
celebrate Elizabeth’s militancy (particularly against Spain), The Maid
of Honor seems to advocate King James’s pacifism and his efforts not
to endanger England’s peace treaty with Spain. As Eva Bryne observed
in 1927, the play’s 1621 production presents a fairly close allegory of
recent political events.66 Specifically, the king of Sicily’s refusal to aid
Bertoldo’s coalition with Urbino against Siena invokes King James’s
refusal in 1620 to aid his son-in-law, the elector Palatine, Frederick V,
in war against Ferdinand II, Catholic archduke of Austria. Mirroring
James’s reluctance to cross Ferdinand, who was backed by Spain and
the Catholic League of Germany, Roberto shies away from aiding
Urbino for fear of endangering his truce with Siena. Bertoldo’s critique
of the king clearly resonates with critiques of King James’s pacifism
and his alleged susceptibility to court favorites. Labeling the advi-
sors who praise Roberto’s caution “sycophants,” Bertoldo contends
that “vertue, if not in action, is a vice” and that “peace (the nurse of
drones, and cowards)” is indicative not of “health,” but of “disease”
(1.1.181–9).
Bertoldo’s argument is eloquently phrased and not wholly unsym-
pathetic, but ultimately the peace-making Roberto receives the moral
sanction of the play. Weighing his concern for his subjects over that for
his own fame, Roberto cites as justification for his pacifism a general
aversion to violence motivated solely by imperial ambition:
Let other Monarchs

Contend to be made glorious by proud warre,
And with the blood of their poore subjects purchase
Increase of Empire. (1.1.158–61)
...
Wee that would be knowne
The father of our people in our study,
And vigilance for their safety, must not change
Their plough-shares into swords, or force them from
The secure shade of theire owne vines (1.1.164–8)
Here, the critique is not of a soldier who fails to jump into action, as
in Soliman and Perseda, but of one who fails to recognize the virtues
of peace. In expressing solidarity with his peacefully laboring subjects
and refusing to sacrifice them to the bloodshed of an “unjust inva-
sion,” Roberto simplifies the conflict between Urbino and Siena so as
to render it morally clear-cut. In addition, as I discuss further below,
he espouses an anti-imperial rhetoric that the play picks up on in other
contexts to model a distinction between honorable and dishonorable
masculine conquest.
If The Maid of Honor shames Bertoldo for leading a rogue army
against Siena and advocates the retention of peace between Sicily and
Siena, it does so partly in response to the implied but invisible presence
of the Ottoman empire. Just as the Ottoman enemy compels a kind of
truce between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, it engenders a
recognition in the play of the unnaturalness and dishonor of Christian
knights who turn their forces against one another. After quelling the
attack by Bertoldo’s army, the general of Siena, Gonzaga, at first per-
ceives virtue in his opponent’s military prowess, but then retracts his
approval when he discovers him to be a fellow Knight of Malta:
The brave Bertoldo!
A brother of our Order! By Saint John,
(Our holy patron) I am more amaz’d,
Nay thunderstrooke, with thy Apostacy,
And praecipice from the most solemne vowes
Made unto heaven, when this, the glorious badge
Of our redeemer was conferr’d upon thee,
By the great master, then if I had seene
A reprobate Jew, Atheist, Turke, or Tartar
Baptiz’d in our religion. (2.5.49–58)
Exclaiming that he is more shocked by Bertoldo’s attack upon Urbino
than if he had seen the baptism of “a reprobate Jew, Atheist, Turke, or
Tartar,” Gonzaga compares the undoing of a Knight’s “solemn vows”
to the impossibility of converting non-Christians to Christianity. His
explicit references to St. John and the “glorious badge / Of our redeemer,”
a holy cross worn on the Knight’s uniform, invoke the Catholicity of
the Order and, in doing so, demonstrate how Catholicism stands in for
“Christian” when set in opposition to the unconvertible “Jew, Atheist,
Turke, or Tartar.” Whereas in other contexts, the Catholic may have
joined this list of reviled others, he is here set in opposition to them. As
this chapter has argued, English Protestant audiences’ identification
with the figure of the Knight and his Catholic vows becomes possible
because of the need to recognize the more insurmountable difference of
those outside the fold of Christianity.
But the play does not merely encourage an identification with
Catholicism as a matter of ecumenical practicality, echoing the logic
of a Catholic-Protestant alliance against the Turk. It goes further in
specifically locating power in the Catholic objects and vows that are
particular to the Knight of Malta. When Bertoldo first enters the stage,
his costume is remarked upon by a counselor of state: “He in the Malta
habit / Is the naturall brother of the King” (1.1.37–8). As we have
seen, this distinctive costume, distinguished by long black robes and a
characteristically shaped and readily identifiable “Maltese” white cross,
was outlawed in England by the parliamentary statute of 1540. Though
relegated to the prop bin, the Knight’s “Malta habit” produced a visual
spectacle on the stage that still retained power. After Gonzaga recog-
nizes Bertoldo as a fellow Knight, he tells his men that Bertoldo was
once worthy of wearing the cross because of his “matchless courage”
“against the Ottoman race,” and then proceeds to rip it from his chest
(2.5.69, 71). Bertoldo begs in turn, “Let me dye with it, / Upon my
breast” (2.5.76–7). Though a mere object, the cross signifies in the play
as an external manifestation of Bertoldo’s Catholic vows and his iden-
tity as a Knight. Only when he renews his vow of celibacy at the end
of the play is the cross restored to him. Thus, the question posed and
answered by the play is not whether the Knight of Malta’s cross retains
any value, but whether Bertoldo is virtuous enough to wear it.
If chastity serves as a barometer for Bertoldo’s virtue, it represents
a larger set of masculine behaviors that the play defines in relation to
imperial activities. The play’s interest in reforming masculinity also res-
onates with contemporary anxieties about the deterioration of English
masculinity in the wake of peace, including worries about unemployed
English soldiers whose poverty bred discontent and restless renegad-
ism. One of Roberto’s advisors reveals the growing number of these
men in Sicily when he informs the king that “more [men] than you
thinke” have joined Bertoldo’s volunteer army: “All ill affected spir-
ites in Palermo / . . . whose poverty forc’d em / To wish a change, are
gone along with him” (2.1.11–15). Prior to his redemption, Bertoldo
embodies the voice of these soldiers. Reminding King Roberto that his
command lies “not in France, Spaine, Germany, or Portugall,” but in a
small “Island” that lacks “mines of gold,” “silver” or worms of “silke,”
Bertoldo suggests that the solution to Sicily’s poverty and overpopu-
lation is overseas plunder (1.1.194–7). Finally, he points to England
as both an example of former imperial might and an object lesson in
contemporary passivity:
Let not our armour
Hung up, or our unrig’d Armada make us
Ridiculous to the late poore snakes our neighbors
Warm’d in our bosomes, and to whom againe
We may be terrible: while wee spend our houres
Without variety, confined to drinke,
Dice, Cards, or whores. Rowze us, Sir, from the sleepe
Of idlenesse, and redeeme our morgag’d honours. (1.1.229–36)
Invoking a contemporary critique of James’s court, the play uses

Bertoldo to model a misguided solution to the drink, dice, cards, and
whores of unemployed soldiers, in the form of imperialism. However,
rather than advocate a return to Elizabethan imperialism, the play sug-
gests that national and masculine honor must be restored in another
way. Accordingly, it seeks to reform Bertoldo into a gentleman by
idealizing chastity as a sign of imperial restraint. His innate potential
for such reform is suggested by his patient suffering when divested of
all luxuries as a prisoner in Siena; rather than give over to violence or
dissolution, he expresses a willingness to “weare / These fetters till [his]
flesh, and they are one / Incorporated substance” (3.1.189–91).
Significantly, the transgression that disbars Bertoldo from the knight-
hood – aiding Urbino in its attack on Siena – is figured not just as a
crime against a fellow Knight of Malta but as a crime against a woman,
the duchess of Siena. When Aurelia questions Gonzaga about whether
the man they hold captive (Bertoldo) is a Knight of Malta, Gonzaga
explains, “Hee was, Madam, / Till he against his oath wronged you,
a princesse, / Which his religion bound him from” (4.4.35–7). In
turn, the play demonstrates the iniquities of offending a woman
and models the virtues of consent over force by drawing an analogy
between heterosexual relationships and imperial ones. For example,
Camiola reprimands Roberto for trying to subjugate her to a suitor
she does not love: “Tyrants, not Kings, / By violence, from humble
vassals force / The liberty of their souls” (4.5.63–5). She suggests that
the honorable course to take both in political and in heterosexual
relationships is one based on consent and mercy, rather than tyranny
and violence. Similarly, Aurelia rebukes the duke of Urbino by invok-
ing the bad example of “the Lordly Roman,” who humiliated “kings
and Queenes” by forcing them “to wait by his triumphant chariot
wheeles,” and thus “depriv’d himself / Of drawing neare the nature of
the gods . . . in being mercifull” (4.4.3–8). She concludes, “To seeke by
force, what courtship could not win, / Was harsh, and never taught in
loves milde school” (4.4.11–12).
This lesson of mercy informs Camiola’s attempts to reform Bertoldo,
and the resolution of the play needs to be read in this context. In fact,
without understanding Camiola’s decision to release Bertoldo from his
marriage contract as an act of mercy, rather than an act of self-interest,
it is difficult to make sense of the ending. The play draws explicit
attention to the conflicting motives of self-interest and self-sacrifice
by first setting the audience up to believe that Camiola will force
Bertoldo to make good on the marriage contract and then showing
her do just the opposite. When, in the second-to-last scene, Camiola
learns that Bertoldo has betrayed her and is about to marry Aurelia,
she responds,
You perhaps
Expect I now should seeke recovery
Of what I have lost by teares, and with bent knees
Beg his compassion. No; my towring vertue
From the assurance of my merit scornes
To stoope so low. I’ll take a nobler course,
And confident in the justice of my cause,
...
Ravish him from [Aurelia’s] armes; you have the contract
In which he swore to marrie me?
...
He shal be then against his wil my husband. (5.1.102–12)
We assume that Camiola’s alternative to “seek[ing] recovery / Of
what [she] has lost by teares, and with bent knees” will be to force
Bertoldo “against his wil” to marry her. She removes an expectation
of supplication and creates an expectation of force, but then delivers
the unexpected by acting in mercy. It is clear that although the audi-
ence does not anticipate her decision, she is already planning it in this
scene, when she sends for her “confessor” (5.1.128), Father Paulo,
and announces that she will “attire [her]selfe / Like a Virgin-bride,
and something . . . doe / That shall deserve mens prayse, and wonder
too” (5.1.130–2). In the next scene, with the king and Aurelia serving
as judges, Camiola releases Bertoldo from the contract and thus
brings about his voluntary contrition. She then takes orders to enter
the nunnery and “conjure[s]” Bertoldo “to reassume [his] Order; and
in fighting / Bravely against the enemies of our faith / Redeeme [his]
morgag’d honor” (5.2.286–8). Bertoldo’s white cross is then restored
by Gonzaga and he replies, “I’ll live and die so” (5.2.290). Thus,
Camiola’s unexpected mercy successfully cultivates virtuous mascu-
linity in Bertoldo, a masculinity anchored in his restored identity as a
becrossed Catholic Knight.
The Maid of Honor is striking not only for its equation of vowed
celibacy with masculine redemption but for its positioning of this
resolution as its celebratory and comic conclusion, openly defying both
conventional marriage plots and Protestant culture’s emphasis on mar-
riage. It is a conclusion made uniquely possible through tragicomedy – a
genre that frequently rendered the impossible possible and at the same
time was much beholden to specific historical conditions. Understood in
relation to the larger themes of imperial restraint, Christian brotherhood,
and the ongoing crusade against the Turks, the Knight’s vow of celibacy
and the maid’s virginity lend special poignancy to their decisions at the
end of the play to devote themselves to separate and chaste lives. In
Massinger’s source, William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), as well
as Boccaccio’s tale of Camiola and Rolande before it, the male protago-
nist is not a Knight of Malta and his resignation to a chaste life is not
depicted as a fructifying or triumphant resolution. Rather, the fact that
the lovers remain unmarried in the end signifies as a punishment for the
hero and as testimony to the heroine’s virtue and refusal to compromise
for an unworthy man. Similarly, when Massinger’s The Maid of Honor
was revived in 1785 at the Theatre Royal, it failed dismally because
audiences deemed the ending unintelligible – why would the two lovers
not end up together? By contrast, in its own time the play enjoyed great
popularity and remained in the repertories of the Phoenix and Red Bull
for eighteen years. This popularity, I submit, arises from an investment
particular to the early seventeenth century in reclaiming the Knights of
Malta as templates for a chaste and restrained masculinity.
Imperial Alliance and Gentle Conquest: The Travails of the

Three English Brothers
As I have suggested throughout this chapter, the stage’s investment in

knightly chastity addressed a need for a Christian masculinity anchored
in bodily control, a need informed in part by sexual and reproductive
anxieties generated by the threat of Islam. The vow of chastity not
only guarded against racial contamination, but also addressed specific
concerns about the unrestrained sexual practices of contemporary
Christian privateers and their susceptibility to conversion through
bodily temptation. The celebration of masculine chastity thus revealed
an emerging sense of race linked to the sexual regulation of herit-
able somatic difference and pointed up the utility of Catholic models
of resistance that were embodied and material, serving to bolster
the otherwise ethereal notions of Christian spiritual faith and resist-
ance. Thus, the stage’s rehabilitation of the Knights of Malta signaled
not merely a re-embracement of Protestantism’s Catholic past, but
rather a resignification of Catholic models as anchors for a Christian
masculine identity against Islam. In addition, male chastity served as an
instrument for restoring the Christian man’s ability to direct his aggres-
sions against the Turk by cultivating a clear, single-minded focus. The
Spanish writer Bartholomew Leonardo de Argensola alludes to this
quality when he describes Francis Drake’s reluctance to attack Spanish
possessions in the West Indies because doing so would mean crossing
a Knight of Malta. Argensola characterizes Drake’s Spanish adversary
as “a Batchelor, nothing weakened with Womanish Affection, or the
Care of Children; but watchful, and intent upon defending the Place,
and so Resolute, that he would dye on the Spot before he would lose
it.”67 In these terms, chastity simplifies a warrior’s calling by severing
all genealogical bonds. To be chaste, then, was to be a race of one.68
But male chastity also cemented bonds of fellowship between men
and served as a model for pan-Christian alliances held together by a
common cause and shared values of masculine self-restraint, temper-
ance, and gentility. In important ways, this behavioral ideal addressed
concerns about the class status of English privateers and adventurers. If,
as Feerick has suggested, foreign contact unsettled class hierarchies based
on blood lineage by making unlanded men eligible for social promotion,
the stage assuaged class anxieties about male adventurers by cultivating
Christian crusaders who were also gentlemen in manners.69 This model
of gentility, expressed through behavior rather than inherited rank,
began with the ability to exert control over one’s body, and set a
standard for the redemption of Christian renegades.
As a play like The Maid of Honor demonstrates, gentle masculinity
was desirable not only in conflicts that demanded resistance, but also in
contexts where the Christian Knight operated as an invader or imperial
presence. The Knight of Malta’s legendary identity as both defender of
Christian territories and imperial crusader made him an apt model for
a range of cross-cultural enterprises. I want to conclude by suggesting
that this model of masculinity resonates in plays that feature Christian
protagonists who are not necessarily Knights of Malta but who
conquer others through their unwavering chastity, temperance, and
mercy. Examples include John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1619–21)
(for which Argensola’s narrative served as a source); Fletcher and
Massinger’s The Sea Voyage (1622); and John Day, William Rowley,
and George Wilkins’s The Travails of the Three English Brothers
(c.1607). Negotiating male rivalries and alliances across a variety of
cross-cultural settings, these plays model masculinity tempered by
civil, martial, and bodily restraint oriented around uncompromising
cultural values, including the refusal to convert. In The Island Princess,
two Portuguese suitors compete for the eponymous Moluccan princess
while simultaneously staking a colonial claim to her island; the untested
newcomer prevails by gently taming the pagan princess into submission
(and eventually Christian conversion) through his superior example
of sexual restraint, carefully directed force, and resolute commit-
ment to his Christianity. Similarly, The Sea Voyage resolves a conflict
among European colonists, this time French and Portuguese, through
a love story that rewards innate gentility as expressed through bodily
restraint, including the ability to maintain gentlemanly conduct while
withstanding unbearable hunger.
While the European imperial contexts of The Island Princess and
The Sea Voyage have led literary critics to insist on their differentiation
from the “Turk” plays, their valorization of temperate but resolutely
unconvertible Christian male protagonists suggests that resistance
and conquest were not conceived as inherently distinct enterprises
in the early modern period. In this regard, The Travails of the Three
English Brothers is a particularly useful example because it relocates its
Christian protagonists across a range of distinct eastern and European
geographies, and in doing so illustrates the intertwined agendas of
Christian conquest and resistance. Whereas Robert Shirley’s stay in
Persia explores the potential for Christian missionary efforts and a
Christian-Persian alliance in which Persia defers to Christianity’s
morally superior example, Anthony Shirley’s capture by Turks in Kea
and subjection to torture in Constantinople emphasize the utility of
Christian resistance to a mightier imperial force.
In depicting the Shirleys’ attempts to forge explicit alliances with
both the Persian sophy and the Catholic pope, the play demonstrates
just how far the stage will go in sanctioning alliances against the
Turk. The Shirleys’ open, even reverent attitude toward the pope is par-
ticularly striking given their English identities. Whereas the other plays
discussed in this chapter model masculine redemption and Christian
alliance through Sicilian, Neapolitan, Rhodian, Maltese, and otherwise
Catholic characters, this play features protagonists who were native
English Protestants. In scene five of the play, Anthony Shirley visits
Rome and makes an appearance before the pope and his cardinals,
saluting the pope thus: “Peace to the father of our Mother Church, / The
stair of men’s salvations and the key / That binds or looseth our trans-
gressions” (5.38–40).70 His recognition of the Catholic church as “our”
(English Protestantism’s) “Mother Church” is even more remarkable
given the fairly recent memory of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which
helped inspire Dekker’s vehemently anti-Catholic Whore of Babylon,
performed in the same year as The Three English Brothers. However,
the Catholic sympathies identified in many of the plays discussed in
this book help to make sense of this English identification with Rome,
revealing how the common Muslim enemy compels an ecumenical alli-
ance that is both politically advantageous and conceptually practical in
terms of bolstering Protestant faith with tangible or embodied Catholic
practices. Anthony acknowledges the Turkish impetus for his alliance
with Rome, when, with the Persian Halibeck in tow, he appeals to the
pope for the support of “Christian princes” to “lend level strength” to
their league against the Turk (5.44). As Anthony Parr notes, the play’s
depiction of the papacy was so flattering that it was deemed suitable
viewing for a Catholic family in 1609.71
Interestingly, the pope’s support, which is contingent upon Anthony’s
learning a lesson from him in self-restraint, suggests that an alliance
with Rome belies an imperial hierarchy that differs from the one between
the Shirleys and the Persian sophy. Specifically, the pope chastises
Anthony for striking his Persian traveling companion when Haliback
attempts to accompany him onto the dais of the pope’s throne:
Refrain therefore! And whate’er you are,
If you were kings as but king’s ministers
Thinking by privilege of your affairs
Your outrage hath a freedom, you are deceived. (5.59–62)
The pope’s reproach of Anthony, rather than Halibeck, makes clear
who wields the ultimate authority among them – an authority that
demands equal deference from both Protestant gentleman and Persian
noble. Only after Anthony apologizes for the “heat of blood” that
temporarily overcame him and made him forget his presence in a place
“wherein all knees should stoop” does the pope authorize him to sign
his name in an official register and promise to back him with the mili-
tary support of other Christian princes (5.65, 67). Like Ferneze’s alli-
ance with Spain in The Jew of Malta, Anthony’s alliance with the pope
is both hierarchical and equivocal in nature.
In contrast to the respectful submission they show to the papal hier-
archy, the Shirleys’ alliance with the sophy reveals an imperial hierar-
chy that subjugates the Persians to English Protestantism. The Shirleys
explain that they have come to Persia to aid in the wars against Turkey
because they have been so successful in securing England that “war no
more dares look upon our land” (1.141), rendering them “unactive”
and in need of “employment” (1.144). In addition to extending the
charity of their military support, the Shirleys enlighten the Persians
about the virtues of gentle, Christian conquest. In the opening scene,
they answer a mock battle staged by the Persians with their own mock
battle in which they display their superior Christian methods. Whereas
the Persians parade their victory over the Turks by mercilessly dis-
playing their victims’ heads on spears, the Shirleys model Christian
clemency by sparing the lives of their Turkish prisoners. The sophy’s
response – “We never heard of honour until now” – conveys a sense of
wonder that culminates later in the scene when, awed by the firing of an
English canon, the sophy mistakes it for a “god” (1.111–17). Over the
course of the play, the Shirleys indoctrinate the Persians as to their true,
Christian God and establish a missionary presence in Persia, facilitated
by Robert Shirley’s romantic seduction of the Persian emperor’s daugh-
ter, the baptism of their child, and the authorization of Robert’s plans
to erect a church and a Christian school. Though the Shirleys distin-
guish this kind of missionary work from raw imperial ambition, which
they associate with Turkish tyranny, they impose a religious influence
in Persia that is simply unimaginable in either Rome or the Ottoman
empire. Both their alliances with Persia and Rome are oriented around
a shared opposition to the Ottoman Turks; however, Anthony’s alli-
ance with the pope is expressed through reverence, whereas Robert’s
alliance with the sophy compels a recognition of English superiority.
When the real-life Robert Shirley traveled to Europe on his
first embassy in 1609, he reputedly wore a turban decorated with
a jeweled crucifix given to him by the pope (see Figure 4.4). The
Figure 4.4: Anthony van Dyck, Sir Robert Shirley (c.1622). Petworth House,
The Egremont Collection (acquired in lieu of tax by H.M. Treasury in 1957 and
subsequently transferred to The National Trust). ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty.
crucifix demonstrates the use of a Catholic object to signal his Christian

identity. While the turban symbolizes his successful integration into
Persian culture, the crucifix seems to reflect his attempt to hold onto
and insist upon the endurance of his Christian faith – a prospect made
more difficult by Protestantism’s invalidation of outward objects of
faith.
The play suggests that one crucial key to sustaining the Shirleys’
Christian identity in any geographical context – whether it be Persia,
Turkey, Russia, Spain, or Italy – is their uncompromising commitment
to brotherhood, a bond literalized through their familial relation-
ship. When Thomas Shirley’s Christian identity is put to the ultimate
test in Constantinople, after he is abandoned by his crew, captured by
Turks, and hoisted onto the rack, he refuses to reveal his “blood and
parentage / And yield under the ransom” the Turks have assigned for
his release (12.102–3). Rather than expose his brothers or his family
name, he adopts a posture of unwavering resistance and a willingness
to be martyred. Repeatedly pressured to convert to Islam, he staunchly
refuses, answering, “First shall the sun melt from his restless seat / Ere
that our name shall turn apostata” (12.113–14). Unbeknownst to him,
his brother Robert has offered to free his Turkish prisoners in Persia
in exchange for Thomas’s release. Addressing the Persian sophy’s
objections to this offer, Robert invokes his sacred commitment to his
brothers:
We in all are three
Sons of one father, branches of one tree.
Should a rough hand but violently tear
One scion from a tree, the rest must bear
Share in the hurt. (11.163–7)
Combining the image of a family tree with that of the Christian trinity,
which unites three persons in one God, Robert’s metaphor suggests that
the fraternal bond between brothers and the integrity of a Christian
identity are mutually sustaining. This emphasis on brotherhood as
the basis for Christian unity protects the integrity of the brothers’
identities as they travel from country to country over the course of
the play. Although they are physically separated by vast distances and
individually seek alliances with other nations, they retain a central
connection to one another. This connection is perhaps most power-
fully illustrated in the play’s epilogue, wherein the Chorus instructs
the audience to imagine the stage divided “into three parts,” represent-
ing Thomas safely returned to England, Anthony’s induction in Spain
into the Knights of the “Order of Saint Iago,” and Robert’s continued
mission in Persia (Epilogue, l. 9, 17). The stage direction reveals a spec-
tacle of the brothers united on one stage and further linked through the
aid of a particular prop: “Enter three several ways the three brothers
. . . Fame gives to each a prospective glass: they seem to see one another
and offer to embrace.” Separated by implied geographical distance but
connected through their views of one another, the three brothers con-
clude the play with a reassuring symbolic gesture that conveys the unity
of Christian values across the globe.
Like The Jew of Malta, The Devil’s Law-case, and The Maid of
Honor, The Three English Brothers was performed at the Red Bull
Theatre and exhibits a number of affinities with the Knight of Malta
plays through its modeling of Christian brotherhood. That it presented
Protestant Englishmen as the representatives of this unified Christianity
constituted a national fantasy for English audiences. However, the
significance of the Shirley brothers in this role was not merely the fact
of their Englishness, but also the fact that their real-life counterparts
were notorious renegade adventurers who had fallen into disrepute
and financial debt. As Parr notes, the Shirleys inspired a considerable
production of laudatory pamphlets, despite their unpopularity “with
people of influence in England.”72 The play acknowledges its agenda
of redeeming these disgraced figures through Fame’s parting plea to the
audience: “Since [the Shirleys] in all places have found favourites, / We
make no doubt of you: ’twere too hard doom / To let them want your
liking here at home” (Epilogue, ll. 31–3). Crucial to the play’s redemp-
tion of the Shirley brothers is its portrayal of them as paradigms of
gentility and civil restraint.
This masculine ideal not only addressed the Shirleys’ asso-
ciation with dishonorable, piratical activities and their questionable
political allegiances, but also compensated for their insecure class
status. Although Thomas and Anthony Shirley possessed the title of
“Sir,” they lacked both wealth and prestige. (Thomas lost all of his
family money in the early 1600s and died in tremendous debt, and
Anthony was forced by Elizabeth to relinquish his knighthood, which
had been conferred on him by Henry IV of France.) Their debase-
ment made them subject to the charges of monetary opportunism that
the stage often attached to adventuring and colonial figures. As Parr
notes, plays like The Sea Voyage mockingly exposed the opportunism
of European adventurers and would-be colonists through its depic-
tion of “feckless gallants . . . modeled on the younger sons of minor
gentry who hoped to find in the colonies the wealth and status denied
them at home.”73 In contradistinction to these figures, the stage also
cultivated a new Christian hero whose inherent virtue was established
not through his inherited class status but through his genteel behav-
ior. To transform the Shirley brothers from figures of national embar-
rassment into gentlemen and legendary national heroes, The Three
Brothers presented them as models of genteel behavior, temperance,
and Christian fellowship.
I want to conclude by suggesting that in some sense the destabiliza-
tion of class produced by geographical displacement and cross-cultural
encounter helped make way for the consolidation of Christian identity
around these behavioral qualities – qualities that ultimately comprised
not just a religious but a racial distinction. Although the Shirley broth-
ers were not Knights of Malta, their unwavering commitment to a
male fellowship oriented around Christian temperance, restraint, and
resistance accomplished similar goals to those of the Knight’s vow of
chastity. The multiple functions of this vow in the plays I have consid-
ered spoke to the ways in which emerging distinctions of race were con-
stituted by both sexually regulated somatic differences and behavioral
(or cultural) differences. Though in some ways distinct, these different
manifestations of an early modern proto-racial logic were intimately
linked and served a similar purpose. If The Three English Brothers and
plays depicting the Knights of Malta extended the bounds of Christian
fellowship across class and geographical boundaries, they also made
clear how this fellowship worked in the service of a certain kind of
uncompromising exclusion.
Epilogue
Turning Miscegenation into

Tragicomedy (Or Not): Robert
Greene’s Orlando Furioso
Robert Greene’s 1591 English stage adaptation of Ludovico Ariosto’s

Orlando Furioso (1516, rev. 1532) converts a sprawling and digres-
sive epic romance into a unified plot centered on interfaith sexual
union. Following just one of Ariosto’s many interwoven storylines,
Greene’s play focuses on the rivalry among international suitors for
the beautiful pagan princess, Angelica. In adapting this story for the
stage, Greene crucially reverses the concluding events as presented in
his source. In Ariosto’s version, Angelica willingly marries the Saracen
warrior Medor, sending his Christian rival Orlando into a fit of tem-
porary madness, which he overcomes through the therapeutic slaughter
of Saracens on the battlefield. In Greene’s version, however, Angelica’s
preference for Medor turns out to be a false rumor and she winds up
marrying Orlando. Thus, the triumph that produces the play’s happy
ending depends less on Orlando’s battlefield prowess in Christian
crusade than on his heroic rescue of the pagan princess from the literally
unthinkable charge that she loved his Muslim rival. In effect, Greene’s
adaptation elevates the stakes of this potential sexual union by making
its consummation or prevention the determining factor between a tragic
or comic resolution.
If I have attempted throughout this book to expose the gendered
and proto-racial stakes of Christian conversion to Islam, the following
analysis considers how the adaptation of Ariosto’s episodic plot into
a dramatic stage play lays bare the cultural stakes that are necessary
to produce a comic ending. My reading is intentionally schematic
in order to emphasize the rigid logic that determines how a story of
interfaith seduction, resistance, and redemption can play out in the
genres of the stage. In some ways, Greene’s Orlando Furioso differs
from the other plays I discuss in this book. Though the plot is framed
by Charlemagne’s battles against the Saracen Turks, it foregrounds not
a simple Christian-Muslim sexual union but a love triangle between
Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy 209
a Muslim warrior, a Christian warrior, and a pagan princess. What
interests me about the resolution of this love triangle is the way it links
a happy ending with a comic coupling that is explicitly contrasted
with the specter of a tragic one. While one way of looking at this is
to say that the Christian hero’s successful rescue of the pagan prin-
cess from Muslim clutches enables a comic resolution, I’d also like to
approach this dynamic from the opposite angle by considering how
generic considerations, informed by the effects of theatrical adapta-
tion and performance, might shape Greene’s depiction of the interfaith
union. Thus, I want to consider how Greene’s revision of Ariosto
reflects the structural demands of making a narrative romance conform
to a dramatic arc, revealing the revisions of content that are necessary
to comically resolve a love triangle between a Christian hero, a Muslim
villain, and a pagan princess. This approach also enables us to consider
the significance of the theatrical medium in representing the dangers of
interfaith unions by exposing the difference between what is possible
in a live performance and in a narrative that is read. Furthermore, the
fact that Greene’s play can imagine no way to attach a happy ending
to Ariosto’s mutually desired union between Angelica and the Muslim
Medor, other than to reveal it as utterly unfounded rumor, tells us
something about the cultural logic of Muslim sexual contamination,
its apparent irreversibility, and its inherent incompatibility with comic
resolution.
In all of my discussions of plays throughout this book I have been
implicitly engaged with questions of genre. I began with a most unlikely
pairing of two of Shakespeare’s plays: the tragedy of Othello and The
Comedy of Errors, and ultimately argued that these two plays – one
a tragedy of difference, and the other a comedy of sameness – have
more in common than one might assume. In Othello, a Moor’s tragic
murder of his white wife and subsequent damnation convey the bodily
limits of a spiritual Christian fellowship that professes to be univer-
sal. Conversely, in The Comedy of Errors, the confusions, violence, and
misunderstanding that result from a lack of bodily distinction among
two sets of identical twins reveals the risks of a Christian universal-
ism that effaces differences. My second chapter, which suggests that
Catholic models of virgin martyrdom underpin dramatic representa-
tions of resistance to Islam, offers an alternative model for figuring
the relationship between bodily persistence and generic resolution. In
Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier,
and the anonymous Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjuror,
martyrdom converts the potential tragedies of Christian persecution
into Christian triumph, resolving the tensions of Pauline fellowship by
imposing an essential division between Christian and non-Christian
identity.
Chapter 3 is also concerned with mediating conversion and resistance
through the conventions of genre. Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, a
fully realized tragicomedy, sets out to redeem the inevitably tragic
ending that results when a Christian refuses the path of martyrdom and
succumbs instead to Islamic conversion. Ultimately, the play illustrates
how the undoing of interfaith sexual seduction and conversion can only
be possible for male Christian renegades; by contrast, if a Christian
woman succumbs to sexual intercourse with a Muslim man and con-
verts, she can never be brought back into the fold. In addition, The
Renegado suggests that, even for male protagonists, Christian redemp-
tion relies upon embodied and material rituals that anchor the ethereal
nature of spiritual faith in more tangible forms. My fourth chapter, on
the portrayal of the Knights of Malta in five Renaissance plays, further
exposes the links between comic resolution, Christian redemption, and
Catholic models. In equating comic resolution with a Knight of Malta’s
re-embracement of his vow of celibacy, these plays invert the conven-
tional marriage plot that normally structures comedy. I show how the
specter of conversion compels an alignment of comic resolution with
the cementing of male fellowship against the Muslim enemy. The plays
that I examine throughout this book all carefully align the logic of con-
version with the comic or tragic arcs of early modern dramatic genres.
While dramatic genre is one factor that shapes the kinds of stories
that the stage produces around the threat of conversion to Islam,
another important factor is the theatrical medium itself. The live per-
formance of plays generated considerations about what could be believ-
ably enacted, what was possible and practical, and what could not be
shown on stage because the presence of the actors’ bodies made it too
real. In addition, the prescribed time constraints on plays, as well as
the material limitations of the early modern theater and the audience’s
expectations of what a stage play should do, underscored the virtues of
retaining Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action. As I illustrate,
the vast differences between Ariosto’s sprawling narrative romance and
Greene’s five-act stage play reflect these considerations. In particular, in
focusing on Greene’s radical rewriting of the interfaith union between
Angelica and the Muslim Medor, I hope to expose the stage’s unique
commitment to containing the threat of interfaith seduction and conver-
sion. If I began this book by drawing attention to the stage’s interplay
with other popular forms of entertainment such as news pamphlets, I
end it by considering what was unique about the stage’s treatment of
conversion to Islam.
Romance, Tragicomedy, and Theatrical Unity
Ariosto’s epic romance is of course famous for its multiple, mean-

dering storylines and its refusal of resolution. As Patricia Parker has
demonstrated, one of the defining characteristics of narrative romance
is its digressive proliferation of storylines that rarely lead to closure
or collectively cohere.1 Described by Parker as “a willful deviation
from epic and its single path,” Ariosto’s narrative poem exempli-
fies romance’s structural looseness. Nevertheless, romance provided
English playwrights with a rich source of material, in part, as Cyrus
Mulready has argued, because it fulfilled fantasies of faraway places
and exotic peoples that were invigorated by England’s nascent involve-
ment in imperial trade and exploration.2 By connecting the production
of romances on the early modern stage to audience’s interests in foreign
places, Mulready makes visible a genealogy of stage romance that
encompasses much more than the late plays of Shakespeare with which
dramatic romance is typically associated. But the narrative conventions
of romance did not lend themselves easily to the conditions and conven-
tions of theatrical enactment. As Mulready observes, “In translating the
elements of romance narrative (travel to foreign lands, feats of magic,
fanciful creatures), dramatists stretched the representational capacity of
the stage.”3 Sir Philip Sidney famously objected to the “gross absurdi-
ties” that resulted when playwrights transferred the disjointed plots
and settings of narrative romance to the theater: romance’s endless
digressions and deferrals conflicted with the stage’s demand for unity
and closure.4 Such digressions also interfered with the build-up of an
audience’s suspense and the catharsis provided by the resolution.
Part of what Sidney’s critique points to are the particular conditions
and contingencies of dramatic enactment, which require unique strate-
gies to effect mimesis and verisimilitude. Mockingly describing the
tendency of contemporary playwrights to disregard classical standards,
Sidney complains,
Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must
believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the
same place: and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon
the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke: and then
the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the mean-
time two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers: and then
what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?5
In capturing the material limitations of the stage, the meandering

quality of romance, and romance’s lack of verisimilitude when trans-
ferred to the stage, Sidney illustrates the inherent differences between
narrative romance and dramatic enactment. Drawing on Aristotle and
Horace, he suggests that playwrights should take pains to construct
plots to meet the demands of the form. Whereas epic romance may be
an appropriate medium for telling episodic stories that unfold across
many places and times, the stage was not.
I want to suggest that the newly emergent genre of tragicomedy
provided an answer to dramatists’ challenge of reconciling the content
of romance with the pressures of dramatic form. Whereas romance
eschewed unity and coherence, tragicomedy forced them through its rigid
structure. Influenced by Giambattista Guarini’s Il pastor fido, performed
in Italy in 1581, English dramatists began experimenting with this form
in the early 1590s, though the word “tragicomedy” did not appear with
any frequency on English title pages until the 1620s. Responding to
contemporaries who viewed tragicomedy as an arbitrary and indecorous
mixture of comic and tragic modes, in Sidney’s words “mingling kings
and clowns,” practitioners such as Guarini and John Fletcher defended
the form as achieving a complex unity through its subordination of
the tragic to the comic, “taking from tragedy . . . its danger but not its
death.”6 While neither Renaissance nor modern critics have been able
to concur on a single definition for tragicomedy, we might agree that it
follows a narrative arc in which there is the potential for tragedy, but
eventually ends with a resolution that is ostensibly comic. Thus, it owes
an important debt to the medieval stage, especially the Corpus Christi
plays, which established a structural pattern of fall and redemption, death
and resurrection, or of suffering transformed into joy through divine
intervention. In the medieval tradition, the potential for tragedy and the
triumphant resolution were not unrelated in a single play, but closely inte-
grated. As Verna Foster explains, “Christian doctrine produces a drama
whose comic conclusion is achieved not despite but because of the tragic
suffering from which it arises.”7 Similarly, Valerie Forman deems tragi-
comedy particularly well suited for resolving economic anxieties about
foreign expenditure because of the way that its own structural economy
transforms losses into profits.8 The structural unity of tragicomedy,
while often overtly forced and mechanical, offered an opportunity for
converting the disjointed plots of romance to the stage.
“Mongrel Tragi-comedy” Or “A Third Thing”?
Certainly, early modern tragicomedy was not without its early modern
critics, chief among them Sidney and other neoclassicists who contended
that tragicomic playwrights failed to attain coherent unity through their
arbitrary mixing of genres and corresponding mixture of high and low
characters. According to Sydney,
their plays be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and
clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head
and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor
discretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right
sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained.9
Somewhat similarly Jason Denores rejected pastoral and tragicomic
drama in his Discorso (1586) for its lack of civic moral utility, a stand-
ard set for poetry by Aristotle in his Poetics. As Matthew Treherne
observes, Denores’s critique also emanates from his belief that “comedy
and tragedy are fundamentally incompatible entities . . . and that the
only way that tragicomedy could exist would be to have a plot which
was double” and therefore lacking in Aristotelian unity.10
But in response to these critics, tragicomedy also had two important
contemporary defenders in Guarini and John Fletcher, who sought to
highlight the integrated and sophisticated relationship that tragicomedy
negotiated between comedy and tragedy. Guarini countered Denores’s
view in his 1599 defense of his highly popular but controversial Il pastor
fido by characterizing tragicomedy not as the yoking together of two
separate genres but as “a third thing that will be perfect in its kind.”11 He
compares the new form to the mating of a horse and an ass, which pro-
duces a mule, or to the mixing of tin and copper to make bronze.12 He
also emphasizes tragicomedy’s complex mediation of comedy and
tragedy in which the tragic is ultimately subordinated to the comic:
[Tragicomedy] takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action,
its verisimilar plot but not its true one, its movement of the feelings but not
its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its
death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amuse-
ment, feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order.13
In describing tragicomedy as subsuming the tensions of tragedy (“its
danger but not its death”) under the “comic order,” Guarini stresses its
careful integration of tragic and comic conventions, its discrete integrity
and its verisimilitude. Similarly, John Fletcher defended tragicomedy’s
unity in his epistle “to the reader,” which was printed in the first edition
of The Faithful Shepherdess (1608). Like Guarini, he emphasizes not
an arbitrary mixing of tragedy and comedy, but the dramatic tension
generated through its suspenseful aversion of death:
A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect
it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near
it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of
familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned.14
Echoing Guarini, Fletcher describes tragicomedy as a kind of third
thing. His observation that tragicomedy “wants [i.e. lacks] deaths . . .
yet brings some near it” describes its structuring principle. Whether or
not it was always successful in producing a unified plot, tragicomedy
pursued coherence precisely through its “mingling” of tragedy and
comedy, a mingling that was not haphazard but carefully orchestrated
in terms of both plot structure and emotional impact.
Greene’s Tragicomic Structure
Notably, Greene’s play was billed as a “historie” on its 1594 title

page – a particularly capacious and unstable generic marker that
often encompassed episodic plots as well as early tragicomic struc-
tures. Critics have questioned the use of title pages to accurately reflect
the ways that audiences understood the genres of early modern plays
and to date the emergence of new genres.15 Indeed, the inconsistent
ways in which dramatic genres were recorded on title pages may lend
insight into the instability of generic designation in and of itself in the
early modern period. Nevertheless, Greene’s play follows a clear tragi-
comic structure. It opens with the contest for Angelica’s hand; turns
toward tragedy in Act 2, when Orlando learns of Angelica’s appar-
ent sexual union with Medor and consequently descends into violent
madness; shifts again through the recuperative tragicomic turn in Act
4, when Orlando is cured by a conjuring sibyl who reveals the union
between Medor and Angelica to have been a villainous rumor; and
concludes with Orlando defending Angelica’s honor, winning her hand,
and anticipating a victorious return to his native France. The particular
way in which the central conflict of the play is resolved seems to adhere
to Guarini’s formula. Rather than overcome a sexual union between
Angelica and Medor, the play insists that such a union has never taken
place, thereby providing the potential for tragedy but not the outcome.
In addition, Greene’s play exemplifies tragicomedy’s characteristic
“mingling” of high and low in that Orlando’s class status makes him
the least likely suitor for Angelica’s hand. Though Orlando is one of
Charlemagne’s twelve peers, he is not equal in rank to the princess
Angelica, daughter to the emperor of Africa, nor can he compete in
status with Angelica’s other royal suitors: the soldan of Egypt, the
king of Cuba, the king of Mexico, and the king of the Isles. I suggest
that the play’s collapsing of class distinctions through the union of
Orlando and Angelica in turn consolidates the religious and racial
differences between Orlando and Medor, Christian and Muslim
rivals. The identity markers that come to matter for Orlando are his
Christianity and his whiteness, as well as his relationship to the ruler of
much of western Europe. By contrast, in his 1591 English translation
of Ariosto’s romance (closely contemporary with Greene’s play), John
Harington relies on a rhetoric of class to construct a category of chiv-
alric masculinity that trumps religious difference. More specifically,
he justifies Medor’s conquest of Angelica by calling attention to his
honorable masculinity, attributed not to inherited nobility but to his
loyal willingness to sacrifice his life for a male friend. Haringon says
in the paratextual allegory that is appended to the end of book 19, “In
Angelica’s wedding with Medore I gather this Allegorie: Angelica is
taken for honor, which brave men hunt after by blood and battells and
many hardie feats and misse it, but a good servant with faith and grate-
fulnesse to his Lord gets it.”16 Importantly, the Lord to whom Medor is
faithful is another man, his friend Clorindano, not the Christian God,
revealing how Harington privileges a homosocial masculine code over
religious affiliation.
Whereas Greene makes Orlando the central protagonist, Orlando
figures as a relatively minor character in both Ariosto’s original and
Harington’s version (despite the poem’s title), playing a less significant
role than Ruggiero, for example. After losing his mind to jealousy when
Angelica runs away with Medor, Orlando reappears in the narrative
only periodically. Eventually he regains his sanity through the aid of
an English duke who locates his lost wits on the moon, and Orlando
is then able to reoccupy his role in the crusades against the Muslim
Turks. If Ariosto’s story provides any sense of closure for Orlando, it is
that he is cured of his unrequited love in order to return to the business
of war. Reinforcing this dichotomy between love and war, Harington
associates Orlando with the moral lesson that love, like idolatry, dis-
tracts a man from his main course. Though Greene departs from this
theme, instead valuing Orlando’s romantic conquest – and the com-
mercial and colonial acquisitions that come with it – Shakespeare picks
up on it in Othello. Like Ariosto, Shakespeare sets Christian crusade
and matters of the heart at odds with one another: if the Turks hadn’t
drowned on the way to Cyprus, Othello would have been too busy
trying to defeat them to become obsessed with his wife’s fidelity. While
Othello swears that “housewives” will never “make a skillet of [his]
helm,” his love for Desdemona does seem to dismantle his professional
self-assurance, in effect converting him from a focused general to an
insecure husband (1.3.273).17 This dichotomy also resonates with the
sultan’s predicament in the popular story of the Sultan and the Fair
Greek, mentioned above as a source for plays discussed in Chapters 2
and 4. Upon conquering Constantinople, the sultan takes possession
of a beautiful Christian captive who in turn captivates his heart. When
his advisors convince him that his love for Irene as well as the constant
jealousy that consumes him are causing him to neglect the affairs of
his empire, the sultan publicly beheads the fair Greek to prove them
wrong. This popular story was appropriated not only by Shakespeare
but also by Thomas Kyd in Soliman and Perseda (c.1589), George Peele
in a lost play titled The Turkish Mahomet and Hyrin the Fair Greek
(c.1594), Thomas Goffe in The Courageous Turk (c.1618), Lodovick
Carlell in Osmond the Great Turk (c.1622), and Gilbert Swinhoe in
Unhappy Fair Irene (1640). Notably, all of these plays are tragedies,
pointing up how Greene’s comic rendering requires that he substitute a
Christian hero for a Muslim one and align, rather than oppose, roman-
tic love and imperial objectives. It also requires that he depart cru-
cially from his source – whether it be Ariosto’s version or Harington’s
translation or both.
A discussion of genre that occurs in Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda offers
insight into how the interpretation of genre depends on a protagonist’s
subject position.18 The play, whose Chorus consists of the allegorical
figures of Love, Death, and Fortune, sustains an ongoing commentary
about how its resolution will unfold and which genre will best describe
it. At times this overarching metatheatrical awareness bleeds into the
fiction of the play. After defeating Rhodes and executing his Christian
rival for the Christian virgin Perseda, Soliman reflects on the play’s
course of events in terms of genre:
Heere ends my deere Erastus tragedie,

And now begins my pleasant Comedie;
But if Perseda vnderstand these newes,
Our seane will prooue but tragicomicall. (5.2.140–3)
While his use of the word “tragicomicall” may at first suggest Sidney’s
understanding of a “mongrel” mixing of tragedy and comedy, it also
calls attention to the ways that genre is determined by a viewer’s
perspective. Whereas, from Soliman’s point of view, Erastus’s death
opens up the potential for a comic ending, the possibility that Perseda
might comprehend his scheme and thwart it would mix his comedy
with tragedy. Indeed, the play’s ultimate characterization as “The
Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda” seems to speak to the fates of both
Muslim persecutor and Christian virgin, reflecting the fact that they
both wind up dead. As the same time, the play’s title and all of its
overt commentary about how things will conclude elide the fact that a
“Comedy of Soliman and Perseda” is not possible on the early modern
stage. The only way that this love triangle could be resolved through
comedy would be for Erastus to survive and marry the Christian
virgin. Thus, it is not so much Soliman’s death as Erastus’s that
finally makes this play a tragedy, revealing the underlying ways that
generic designations crucially privilege the perspective of the Christian
male.
The Love Triangle
In addition to leaving aside numerous plotlines of Ariosto’s narrative

to focus on the story of Orlando, Angelica, and the Muslim rival,
Medor, Greene’s adaptation also reframes the love triangle in signifi-
cant ways. Although both versions are set against the backdrop of war
between Charlemagne and the Saracen Turks, the stage version relo-
cates Angelica from Cathay (or India in Harington’s version) to North
Africa, where she is the daughter of the African emperor, with whom
Charlemagne’s paladins are united in warding off the Turks. Thus,
Greene’s play renders Angelica the subject of a colonial space over
which both Turks and Europeans were vying for control. Greene
reframes his narrative in terms of contested colonial geographies in
other ways as well. Whereas in Ariosto, Angelica’s suitors are eastern
and African, in Greene’s adaptation the same characters are identi-
fied with Cuba and Mexico. In addition, despite Angelica’s ostensible
African heritage, the play repeatedly emphasizes her “fair” skin and
her pagan, rather than Muslim, religion: she is thus construed as a
blank, capable of being reinscribed by her husband. She furthermore
embodies virgin territory ready to be possessed: the man who marries
Angelica also gains by contract her father’s kingdom. At the end of the
play, Orlando anticipates a triumphant return home to France with
Angelica in a ship richly rigged with silks, ivory, cypress, and other
commodities from Barbary. He announces to his fellow Christian
warriors,
So rich shall be the rubbish of our barks,
Ta’en here for ballass to the ports of France,
That Charles himself shall wonder at the sight.
Thus, lordings, when our banquetings be done,
And Orlando espoused to Angelica,
We’ll furrow through the moving ocean,
And cheerily frolic with great Charlemagne. (5.2.1451–7)19
With these words, which conclude the play, Orlando references his
imminent marriage and homecoming in terms that are explicitly
comic. He looks forward to carefree “frolic[king]” with Charlemagne,
who shall “wonder at the sight” of his richly rigged ship. In this way
he imagines that his conquest of Angelica has promoted him in social
status, as if closing the gap between the contrasting highs and lows that
tragicomedy brings together.
But if comic resolution demands female conquest in which the native
woman is reinscribed by her Christian husband, the heroine of Greene’s
play is not merely passive. Timothy Billings’s exploration of the word
“Catayan” and its association with deceptive seduction points to how
this meaning may actually be informed by Angelica’s role as a decep-
tive and ensnaring object of sensual desire.20 Crucially, in both the play
and Ariosto’s poem, Angelica’s husband is of her own choosing. In
Ariosto and Harington, Angelica’s preference for Medor is explicitly
driven by sexual desire. After witnessing Medor being wounded in
honorable combat, Angelica takes pity on him and nurses him back
to health. According to Harington, taking “the juyse” from medicinal
herbs “between her fingers bright” and “infus[ing]” it into Medor’s
“wound,” Angelica “reviv[es] Medoros spright” (19.19). But in the
process of healing him, “another dart” simultaneously “wound[s]
her thoughts and hye conceits so deep”; healing Medor awakens in
Angelica a wound of her own (19.22). She beseeches Medor to heal her
in turn by taking her maidenhead: “though modestie a while did let her,
/ Yet now perforce no further she forbore / But plainly to Medoro told
her griefe / And at his hands as plainly askt reliefe” (19.23). The desire
that drives Angelica’s choice of Medor is overt and palpable, and things
progress fairly rapidly into marriage, sex, and finally the overflowing
joy that prompts them to engrave their linked names on every wall,
stone, or “shadie tree” (19.28).
In Harington’s translation, the narrative progression of Medor and
Angelica’s coupling is depicted in a detailed engraving at the start
of book 19 (Figure 5.1), emphasizing how it begins with Medor’s
loyalty to his male friend and ends with the newly wed Medor and
Angelica riding off into the future and literally off the page. In the
foreground, Medor comes to the aid of his wounded friend; he is
himself wounded in the process; Angelica heals him; they are married;
they have sex under the trees; and they ride off together toward to a
ship in which they set sail for India at the end of book 19 out of 46,
never again to reappear. Book 42 briefly invokes the couple when a
sprite reports that Angelica “was to th’Indies gon, / With her Medoro,
and was welnie there,” thus indicating that the two have successfully
returned to command the throne and live happily ever after. If there is
anything transgressive about their union, it is, ironically, the sense of
Figure 5.1: Book 19 from Ludovico Ariosto (trans. John Harington), Orlando Furioso
(London, 1591), Plate XVIIII. Reproduced by permission of the Massachusetts Center
for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
Medor’s unworthiness due to his low birth, particularly in Harington’s

interpretation. As we have seen, Greene assigns this (somewhat) lower
status to Orlando, showing how his Christian identity compensates for
his lesser nobility. By contrast, Harington in book 30.15 remarks of
Medor “what a Lord / He grew, by matching with so great an haire, /
Liuing with her in loue and, sweet accord, / (Although by byrth an vnfit
matched paire).” In the genre of epic romance, Medor’s identity as a
Muslim and a Turk does not present an obstacle to winning the fair
maiden’s love and “living with her in love and sweet accord.”
Mixing and Un-Mixing it Up
In the first scene of Greene’s play Angelica decisively chooses Orlando,

not Medor, to become her husband, employing the unequivocal words,
“I choose Orlando, County Palatine” (1.1.161). If she had not, I want
to suggest, she would have had to end up in a tragedy like Perseda and
Desdemona. Rather than harboring a burning sexual desire, Greene’s
Angelica is resolutely chaste and innocent – a more suitable bride for
a Christian. However, the mutual love between Angelica and Orlando
is thwarted by a rival suitor named Sacripant, who sows the seeds of
doubt in Orlando by carving Angelica and Medor’s names on trees in
the woods where Orlando strolls. Sacripant plots,
I’ll slyly have engrav’n on every bark
The names of Medor and Angelica.
Hard by, I’ll have some roundelays hung up,
Wherein shall be some posies of their loves,
Fraughted so full of fiery passions
As that [Orlando] shall perceive by proof
Medor hath won his fair Angelica. (2.1.516–22)
Clearly the engravings and posies convey not only love but sexual
passion, which is the real threat to Orlando; in this, they prefigure
Cassio’s ocular proof of Desdemona’s infidelity. Orlando responds to
the sexual implications of this evidence when he exclaims, “No name
of hers / . . . / And yet her name! / for why Angelica; / But, mixed with
Medor, not Angelica” (2.1.588, 591–4). As in Ariosto’s romance, proof
of Angelica’s desire for another man drives Orlando out of his mind;
only here (as later in Othello) his jealousy is completely unfounded. In
making the villainous Sacripant, rather than Medor and Angelica,
the agent who writes their names in the tree trunks, Greene rewrites
romance into tragicomedy, reappropriating the romance trope of
engraving to set up for a comic reversal, or unmixing of Medor and
Angelica. In staging Sacripant’s engraving of false rumors, the play in
effect performs its own rewriting of Ariosto. This rewriting becomes
necessary, I want to suggest, because of the story’s adaptation to a
theatrical medium. The sexual passion between Medor and Angelica,
while tolerable in a written narrative or even a visual engraving, could
not be enacted on the stage without tragic consequences. Both the phys-
ical presence involved in live performance and the theater’s demand for
unity and closure create the impossibility of a triumphal sexual union
between Medor and Angelica.
Angelica’s unwavering choice of Orlando over Medor, her chaste
innocence, and the fact that the engravings are forged are necessary
to produce a tragicomic conclusion from Ariosto’s plot. In Ariosto,
romance structure enables Orlando to go on after Angelica and Medor
drop out of the plot; in Greene’s adaptation, tragicomic structure
demands not only that Orlando possess Angelica but also that she
remain untainted by Medor. Despite their “mingling” of tragedy and
comedy, high and low, tragicomedies are deeply invested in forestalling
certain kinds of mixture. Sacripant’s dying confession leaves unques-
tioned Angelica’s chaste innocence. Although the structure of tragicom-
edy suggests a trajectory in which sexual and religious transgression
might be followed by redemption, in Greene’s Orlando Furioso comic
resolution depends not on the heroine’s redemption but on the revela-
tion that her transgression never actually took place. This elision in
turn reveals the early modern stage’s inability to imagine a recuperation
of a female body after it has been contaminated by a Muslim.
Notably, the potential tragedy that is averted in Greene’s play is the
possibility that Orlando will believe Sacripant’s false rumors and be
consumed by jealousy. He does, in fact, lose his mind temporarily, and
commits several acts of violence. Mistaking a shepherd for Medor, he
cuts off the shepherd’s leg, abuses his servant, beats a clown who cross-
dresses as Angelica, and kills Brandimart, king of the Isles. But he is
miraculously cured of his madness in Act 4 by an “enchantress” named
Melissa. In this way, the plot turns on the conjuring of a sibyl. But
just as significant as the sibyl’s power to turn Orlando’s mind are the
implied limitations of her power: whereas she can restore Orlando to
sanity, she could not undo a sexual union between Medor and Angelica.
Her powers work in the service of Christian conquest. Crucially, as I’ve
mentioned, Orlando is cured of his madness not so that he can return to
his military duties but so that he can marry Angelica. On the stage, the
romantic seduction does the work of the military conquest – a substitu-
tion that lends itself to the emotional and practical aspects of dramatic
enactment.
If tragicomedy consciously reins in the unwieldiness of romance
narratives, it also forces them into alignment with the structures of a
cultural hierarchy. Thus, it enables us to isolate the interesting ques-
tions of what can constitute tragic potential and what can constitute
resolution, which kinds of transgressions can be redeemed and what it
takes to redeem them in convincing ways. The structural necessity of
resolving a potentially tragic crisis with a happy ending forces a kind of
nailing down of one’s cultural investments. As Greene’s play suggests,
it was much more acceptable to dramatize the romantic triumph of a
white Christian than of a Muslim Turk. Kyd and Shakespeare adapt the
triumph of a Muslim lover to a tragic plotline. Just as interesting was
what one could not see on the Renaissance stage: for example, comedies
about English gentlemen who turned Turk or about Muslim tyrants
who turned Christian. For certain, one thing you definitely could not
see on the Renaissance stage was a play about a Muslim Turk who
stole a fair pagan maiden from a Christian hero and lived happily ever
after. That was simply no way to end a play.
Notes
Notes to Introduction
1 Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turke, in Three Turk Plays

from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 6.442–3.
2 For a history of Britons taken captive between 1600 and 1850, see Linda
Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 2002).
3 John Rawlins, The famous and wonderfull recoverie of a ship of Bristoll,
called the Exchange, from the Turkish pirates of Argier (London, 1622),
B1v-2r.
4 Ibid., B2r.
5 Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East,
trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1998).
6 Shakespeare and other playwrights employ the phrase “serve my turn”
in ways that make clear its sexual connotations. See, for example, the
exchange between Costard and the King of Navarre in Love’s Labor’s
Lost 1.1. Instead of admitting that he was caught having sex with a virgin,
Costard says, “I deny her virginity: I was taken with a maid.” In objecting
to this paradox, the King of Navarre replies, “This ‘maid’ will not serve
your turn, sir.” But Costard assures him that, indeed, “This maid will
serve my turn, sir.”
7 Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–
1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 11.
8 Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen,
1982).
9 This revisionist understanding of the Reformation has been influen-
tially argued by Eamon Duffy as well as by literary critics such as
Stephen Greenblatt, both of whom emphasize the vigor of late medieval
Catholicism and the ways in which its remembered traditions continued
to haunt the early modern imagination after the Reformation. See Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Greenblatt, Hamlet in
Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Other works
that paved the way for revisionist histories of the Reformation include
Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs
of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
10 Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern
English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
11 Ibid., 5.
12 “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism, 46.1
(Winter 2004): 167–90.
13 For Jackson and Marotti’s discussion of “alterity” as a central methodo-
logical concern of New Historicist criticism, as well as their sense of New
Historicism’s neglect of both the philosophical roots of alterity and the
alterity of early modern religion, see ibid., 175–9.
14 Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 18.
15 Anthony Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” in
Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, eds. Paul Yachnin and
Patricia Badir (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 83–97, 87.
16 Studies include Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in
the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth
Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society,
Culture, and the World Economy, 1400-Present (Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe, 1999); Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial
Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Gerald Maclean, ed.,
Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
17 On developments in English overseas commerce, see especially Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution; and David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire:
Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490–1690 (New York: Longman,
2000). Literary critics who have addressed England’s shifting position in
the global market include Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama,
Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Valerie Forman, Tragicomic
Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
18 For a history of the rise of the joint stock companies, see Brenner,
Merchants and Revolution. For a discussion of the East India Company’s
reorientation of trade around imports and re-exports, rather than English
exports, see K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The
Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (New York: August
Kelley, 1965).
19 Pierre d’Avity, The estates, empires, & principalities of the world, trans.
E. Grimstone (London, 1615), 936.
20 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
21 Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East,
1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Lisa
Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s Global Interests (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000), whose exploration of a different archive – that of Renaissance
Notes to Introduction 225
art, medals, tapestries, and equestrian images - reveals not a western “oth-
ering” of the Orient, but a culture of mutual East-West exchange. Ottoman
historian Daniel Goffman considers the “societal commingling and cul-
tural blending that accompanied the infusion of Ottoman civilization into
Europe” in The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. Destabilizing western pre-eminence
in a different way, Barbara Fuchs illuminates the dynamics of cultural
mimesis that undermined Spain’s and England’s constructions of their
imperial identities, and exposes the collective threat represented by the
Ottoman empire. See Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and
European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
22 Barbour, Vitkus, and Burton build upon the pioneering work of Nabil
Matar, who, in bringing to light a new archive of English travel narratives,
news pamphlets, and sermons, concluded that prose writings provided
a relatively balanced assessment of Turks, whereas the stage perpetu-
ated inaccurate negative stereotypes. See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain,
1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Turks,
Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), which draw connections between English rep-
resentations of Muslims and Native Americans. In turn, Daniel Vitkus
(2003) and Jonathan Burton (2005) respond to Matar by calling attention
to the many complex and nuanced portrayals of Turks on the stage, which
ranged from laudatory to debased and thus reflected England’s ambiva-
lence toward the more powerful Ottoman empire. In addition, Burton
seeks to rectify the “unidirectional” orientation of previous studies by
attempting to access “Muslim self-representations” in translated Ottoman
narratives (14–15). See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater
and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003) and Burton, Traffic and Turning.
23 Dimmock’s study of Elizabethan drama closely aligns plays produced
between 1581 and 1591 with corresponding political developments and
expresses caution about the applicability of Said’s theories in this period.
He continues to complicate Matar’s one-dimensional assessment of the
stage by arguing that the portrayal of Turkish characters during this ten-
year period “achieved an articulacy and a variety that . . . would not be
superseded” in later periods (6). See New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and
the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Linda McJannet’s (2006) study extends Burton’s methodology: she
addresses whether “the Sultan can speak” by examining dialogue in
English plays about Ottoman history in conjunction with Continental
and Turkish chronicles. Resisting a reading of the plays as “orientalist,”
she warns against “exaggerat[ing] the sense of western ‘anxiety’ or ‘panic’
regarding Islam or the Ottoman empire” (6). See The Sultan Speaks:
Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Benedict Robinson’s exploration of early modern rewritings of medi-
eval chivalric romances, in which the conflict between Christendom and
Islam was central, provides a nuanced discussion of how early modern
writers appropriated romance in order to grapple with the changes in their
own expanding world. See Islam and Early Modern English Literature:
The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
Bernadette Andrea’s much-needed study is unique in its focus on writ-
ings by women and how Anglo-Ottoman relations impinged upon ques-
tions of female agency. See Women and Islam in Early Modern English
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
24 Robinson, 12.
25 R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 318, 319.
26 James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996); Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare
and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,” Representations, 57 (Winter
1997): 73–89; Janet Adelman, “Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion,
and Nation in The Merchant of Venice,” Representations, 81 (Winter
2003): 4–30.
27 McJannet, The Sultan Speaks, 197, fn. 4.
28 See, for example, Donusa’s mocking of her Turkish suitor’s “wainscot
face” and “tadpole-like complexion” in Philip Massinger, The Renegado,
in Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, 3.1.48 and 50.
I discuss these lines in Chapter 3.
29 Burton and Loomba, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary
Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2.
30 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), early
modern “race” was understood in terms of “a group of people belong-
ing to the same family and descended from a common ancestor; a house,
family, kindred” (n6 I.1.a); “the offspring or posterity of a person; a set of
children or descendants” (n6 I.2.a); and “stock, family, or class” (n6 I.4.a.).
OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989.
31 Jean Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in Renaissance Literature
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Many thanks to Jean
for sharing her then unpublished manuscript with me. See also Feerick,
“‘Divided in Soyle’: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The
Sea Voyage,” Renaissance Drama, 35 (2006): 27–54.
32 Feerick, Strangers in Blood, 17.
33 See Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in
Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Joyce
Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity
and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); and Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play: Race on the Renaissance
Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For an analy-
sis of the cultural mythologies of skin color in early modern England,
see Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in
Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004). For a thirty-year overview of scholarship on race and Renaissance
literature, see Floyd-Wilson, “Moors, Race, and the Study of English
Renaissance Literature: A Brief Retrospective,” Literature Compass, 3.5
(June 2006): 1044–52.
Other influential studies of race and early modern English drama
include Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period,
eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994);
Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello
and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” Shakespeare
Quarterly, 49.4 (Winter 1998): 361–74; Emily Bartels, Speaking of the
Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008); Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and
Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41.4
(Winter 1990): 433–54; Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism
Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54.1 (January
1997): 45–64; and Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the
Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and
Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54. 1
(January 1997): 103–42.
34 Dympna Callaghan, “‘Othello was a white man’: Properties of Race on
Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing
Race and Gender on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000),
75–96; Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English
Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Andrea Stevens, “‘Assisted by a Barber’: The Court Apothecary, Special
Effects, and The Gypsies Metamorphosed,” Theatre Notebook, 61.1
(2007): 2–11; and Stevens, ”Mastering Masques of Blackness,” English
Literary Renaissance, 39.2 (Spring 2009): 396–426.
35 Anthony Nixon, Newes from the sea, of two notorious pyrats Ward
the Englishman, and Danseker the Dutchman (London, 1609); Andrew
Barker, A true and certaine report of the beginning, proceedings, ouer-
throwes, and now present state of Captaine Ward and Danseker (London,
1609).
36 For discussions of the play’s moral investments and its utility as a “cau-
tionary lesson,” see Vitkus, Turning Turk, 158, and Matar, Islam in
Britain, 58.
37 Burton, Traffic and Turning, 94.
38 Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five
Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies, 2 (2002): 35–67.
39 Rawlins, Famous and wonderfull recoverie, E3r.
40 Ludovico Cortano, Good newes to Christendome . . . discovering a
wonderfull and strange apparition, visibly seene for many dayes togither
in Arabia, ouer the place, where the supposed tombe of Mahomet (the
Turkish prophet) is inclosed (London, 1620).
41 Ibid., C3r. The phrase “rayning of blood” is part of the full title of the
pamphlet.
42 On the rich and sacred significance of Christ’s blood as an object of ven-
eration, dating from fifteenth-century Catholic practices, see Caroline
Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval
Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007). For an interesting discussion of the spectacle of Christ’s
blood as a sign of resistance, informed by the Corpus Christi plays, see
Claire Sponsler’s chapter on “Violated Bodies” in Drama and Resistance:
Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
43 Cortano, Good newes, A3.
44 Ibid., F4r–v.
45 Nathaniel Butter, publisher and bookseller from 1604 to 1664, published
a variety of books, including sermons, plays, practical works, and travel
narratives, but he is best known for publishing scores of cheap news
pamphlets in the 1620s and 1630s. For more on Butter and newsbooks,
see Folke Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical
Newsbooks, 1620–1642 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1952), and
Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 132–4.
46 On the sensational aspects of virgin martyr legends, see Karen Bamford,
Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2000).
47 For a study of the romance narrative form as a vehicle for imagining
Christian-Muslim encounter, see Robinson, Islam and Early Modern
English Literature.
48 See, for example, Geraldine Heng’s discussion of sexual seduction and
conversion in The Man of Law’s Tale and other versions of the Constance
story. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural
Fantasy, esp. “Beauty and the East, a Modern Love Story” (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002).
49 See, for example, Exodus 34.12–16, where God commands Moses, “Take
hede to thy self, that thou make no compact with the inhabitants of the
land whither you goest, lest thei be the cause of ruine among you . . . And
lest thou take of their daughters vnto thy sonnes, and their daughters go
a whoring after their gods, and make thy sonnes go a whoring after their
gods.” Geneva Bible [The Bible and Holy Scriptures . . .] (London, 1560).
50 For a historical overview of Reformation debates and developments,
see Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The
Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–
1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nicholas Tyacke,
Aspects of English Protestantism c.1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002); and David Cressy, ed., Religion and Society in
Early Modern England: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1996).
51 For James I’s injunction against piracy, see By the King. A proclamation
against pirats (London, 1608 [i.e., 1609]); STC 8426.
52 In his Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed
Sources (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), Peter Milward
summarizes two debates that fueled a Calvinist resurgence in the second
decade of the seventeenth century: ongoing debates between Calvinists and
Catholic polemicists and the beginnings of the Arminian controversy. For
the shifting contours of Jacobean anti-Catholicism, see Milton, Catholic
and Reformed, esp. 31–59; for useful lists of many of the polemical works
involved, see Milward, Religious Controversies, 72–131. For the early
Arminan controversy, see ibid., 33–44. According to Milward, English
Calvinists responded to the theological attacks of Jacobus Arminius with
polemical tracts of their own. The Calvinist backlash to Arminianism
gained strength in 1612 in attacks on Konrad Vorst, successor to Arminius
and an alleged Socinian. English responses to Vorst were swift and critical;
they included a pamphlet by James I, entitled His Maiesties declaration con-
cerning his proceedings with the states generall of the United Provinces of
the Low Countreys, in the cause of D. Conradus Vorstius (London, 1612).
53 For other critical discussions that explore the play in relation to
Arminianism, see Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature,
ch. 4; and Michael Neill, “Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy
and Tragicomic Form in Massinger’s The Renegado,” in Early Modern
Tragicomedy, eds. Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2007), 154–74.
54 W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
55 Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England,
1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
56 See Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion: Verse and Change from
Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Murray, “‘Now I am a Catholique’: William Alabaster and the Early
Modern Catholic Conversion Narrative,” in Catholic Culture in Early
Modern England, eds. Ronald Corthell, Frances Dolan, Christopher
Highley, and Arthur Marotti (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University
Press, 2007), 189–215; and Holly Crawford Pickett, “Motion Rhetoric
in Serial Conversion Narratives: Religion and Change in Early Modern
England,” in Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism,
ed. Lowell Gallagher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcom-
ing). On the performance of conversions between Catholicism and
Protestantism, see also Arthur Marotti, “Performing Conversion,” in
Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic
Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005), 95–130.
57 For critical studies that illustrate Protestant England’s continued reli-
ance on religious materiality, see James Kearney, The Incarnate Text:
Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology
and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ramie Targoff, Common
Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Tessa Watt, Cheap
Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991). Protestant denunciations of Catholic forms of materiality
are extremely abundant; see for example the Church of England, Certain
sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen
Elizabeth of famous memory and now reprinted for the use of private fam-
ilies, in two parts (London, 1687); the frontispiece to John Foxe, Acts and
Monuments (London, 1563); Thomas Williamson, The sword of the spirit
to smite in pieces that antichristian Goliah (London, 1613) (see Chapter 3
for an image taken from this text); The popes pyramides (London, 1624);
and Jean de Chassanion, The merchandises of popish priests (London,
1629).
58 Samuel Hieron, The baptizing of the eunuch in three sermons vpon Acts.
8. 36. 37. 38 (London, 1613). For another contemporary sermon discuss-
ing these biblical passages, see Charles Sonibancke, The eunuch’s conver-
sion (London, 1617), 21.
59 Ibid., 22.
60 E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., The Arden Shakespeare Othello, 3rd ed. (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1996).
61 For one of many news stories published on Lindh in 2001, see Daniel
Klaidman, Michael Isikoff, et al., “Walker’s Brush With Bin Laden,”
Newsweek (December 31, 2001): 20.
Notes to Chapter 1
1 Biblical quotations throughout the chapter are taken from the Geneva
Bible [The Bible and Holy Scriptures . . .] (London, 1560).
2 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42.
3 A range of sermons explicating Paul’s reference to “circumcision of
the heart” include John Donne’s commemoration of the Feast of the
Circumcision (1624); William Attersoll, The Badges of Christianity
(London, 1606); William Perkins, A commentarie or exposition, vpon the
fiue first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1604); Francis
Bunny, A comparison betweene the auncient fayth of the Romans, and the
new Romish religion (London, 1595); and Henry Smith, A preparatiue to
marriage (London, 1591).
4 R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 1.
5 The doctrine of predestination was first outlined in England in Article
XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563). It
was then more explicitly defined in the Lambeth Articles, devised by
Archbishop John Whitgift in 1596. See the Lambeth Articles, as quoted by
H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1958), 371.
6 For history on the debates, see in addition to Kendall, Porter, Reformation
and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge; Peter Milward, Religious Controversies
of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1977); Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan
Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Nicholas Tyacke,
Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987); Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Anthony Milton, Catholic
and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant
Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
and Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England,
1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 9.
Notes to Chapter 1 231
8 John Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance: Puritanism and the Bible
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
9 Several influential historical studies detail England’s expanding com-
mercial relations in the eastern Mediterranean during the early modern
period. Chief among these are Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution:
Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders,
1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Kenneth
Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and
the Genesis of the British Empire 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); and Ralph Davis, English Overseas Trade, 1500–
1700 (London: Macmillan, 1973). For a discussion of Mediterranean
commerce in relation to the emergence of European capitalism, see
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972).
10 On maritime trade and the threat of conversion, see Nabil Matar, Islam
in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural
Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Vitkus argues that anxieties associated with expanding Mediterranean
commerce directly informed the popular stage’s preoccupation with
“Turks” and the phenomenon of “turning Turk.”
11 See The policy of the turkish empire (London, 1597) for a theological inter-
pretation of Islam from the English perspective. For a critical analysis of
the threatening theological links between Islam and Christianity, see Julia
Reinhard Lupton, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline
Discourse of Nations,” Representations, 57 (Winter 1997): 73–89.
12 Lupton, Citizen-Saints, and Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to
Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Other critics who have influ-
entially traced Paul’s influences in early modern literature include Janet
Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and Lisa Lampert, Gender
and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For an excellent overview of critical reas-
sessments of St. Paul’s legacy, see Lupton, “The Pauline Renaissance,”
forthcoming in The European Legacy. Many thanks to Julia Lupton for
sharing her then unpublished manuscript with me as well as for her invalu-
able help in framing my discussion of St. Paul.
13 Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 30.
14 Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion, 3.
15 Ibid., 16, 13. As Kneidel notes, his use of the term “struggling universal-
ity” is indebted to Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse
Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 109.
16 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans.
Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), and Giorgio
Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to
the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005). Other theorists with whom Badiou and Agamben (and by exten-
sion Lupton and Kneidel) are in dialogue with about St. Paul’s thought
include Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin. Other schol-
arship emphasizing the continuities between Paul’s rabbinic education and
his writings include Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics
of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Jacob Taubes,
The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004); and Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense
of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
17 Badiou, Saint Paul, 35.
18 Ibid., 43.
19 Ibid., 59, 73.
20 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 62.
21 Ibid., 35.
22 Ibid., 18.
24 Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early
Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 114.
25 Henry Smith, Foure Sermons Preached by Master Henry Smith (London,
1599): sig. H4v. (STC 22748)
26 Thomas Rymer, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 134.
27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas M.
Raysor (London: J. M. Dent, 1960); first pub. 1930.
28 All quotations from Othello are taken from E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., The
Arden Shakespeare Othello, 3rd ed. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons,
1996).
29 The title of an article by Karen Newman alludes to this connection, though
it focuses not on Othello but on Desdemona and how her subversive
femininity is aligned with “blackness and monstrosity.” See Newman,
“‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,”
in Shakespeare Reproduced, eds. Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor
(London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 143–62.
30 Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and
New York: Methuen, 1987), 79.
31 For a discussion of the complex set of cultural and religious resonances
attached to Shakespeare’s Ephesus, especially the Hellenic resonances,
see Randall Martin, “Rediscovering Artemis in The Comedy of Errors,”
in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: Selected Proceedings of the
International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001,
eds. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Fores (Newark: University of
Delaware Press), 363–79.
32 Wayne Meeks, ed., The Writings of St. Paul: A Norton Critical Edition,
Annotated Text and Criticism (New York: Norton, 1972), 122.
33 Patricia Parker, “Anagogic Metaphor: Breaking Down the Wall of
Partition,” in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honor of Northrop Frye, eds.
Eleanor Cook, et al. (University of Toronto Press, 1983), 38–58. Reading
The Comedy of Errors in relation to St. Paul’s epistles, Parker analyzes the
interplay between the play’s internal structure and its Pauline references
to divorce, division, and the middle wall of partition. She argues that the
play occupies a symbolic “space of dilation” that corresponds structurally
to the “anagogic relationship” between Paul’s breaking down of Jewish
barriers and the Apocalypse, a gap that is ultimately resolved through the
convergence of doom and nativity at the play’s conclusion. Parker briefly
revisits this discussion in Literary Fat Ladies, where she links the “chias-
mic placing” of Egeon’s family on the mast of the ship to the reunion of
divided sides in Paul’s Epistle. For a broader discussion of the multiple bib-
lical echoes operating in The Comedy of Errors, see Parker’s “Shakespeare
and the Bible: The Comedy of Errors,” Recherches Semiotiques/Semiotic
Inquiry, 13.1 (1993): 47–71.
34 Linda McJannet, “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in
Pericles and The Comedy of Errors,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and
Geography in English Renaissance Drama, eds. John Gillies and Virginia
Mason Vaughan (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 86–106; and
Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease
in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004).
35 Harris, Sick Economies, 31.
36 All quotations from The Comedy of Errors are taken from T. S. Dorsch,
The New Cambridge Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors, updated ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
37 Arthur Kinney, “The Comedy of Errors: A Modern Perspective,” in
The New Folger Library Edition: The Comedy of Errors (New York:
Washington Square Press, 2004), 179–96, esp. 185. See also Kinney,
“Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” Studies in
Philology, 85.1 (Winter 1988): 29–52.
38 See indexes of Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, ed. Mary Anne
Everett Green (London, HMSO, 1858).
39 Notes Concerninge Trade Collected by Robr Williams, 1631–54
(University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 207).
40 Vitkus, Turning Turk, 162.
41 Harris, Sick Economies, 30.
42 Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the
Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008).
43 Jackson, The converts happines (London, 1609), 4.
44 Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare’s Leap,” New York Times Magazine
(September 12, 2004): 52.
45 Queen Elizabeth to the Lord Mayor et al., 11 July 1596 and 18 July 1596,
and in Acts of the Privy Council of England, n.s., 26 (1596–7), ed. John
Roche Dasent (London: Mackie, 1902), 16–17, 20–1.
46 In the OED, see “part” 12; “title” 7; and “perfect” 4. OED Online, 2nd
ed., 1989.
47 Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with
Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in Lamb as Critic, ed.
Roy Park, Routledge Critics Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1980), 97. The essay was first published in 1812.
48 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and
Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997), 125–55.
49 Ibid., 136.
50 Robert N. Watson, “Othello as Protestant Propaganda,” in Religion
and Culture in Renaissance England, eds. Claire McEachern and Debora
Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 234–57.
51 For a reading of Othello in relation to the protagonists of early
modern adventure plays, see Jean Howard “Gender on the Periphery,” in
Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, eds. Clayton et al., 344–62.
52 John Leo Africanus, A geographical historie of Africa, ed. John Pory
(London, 1600). For a discussion of Leo Africanus’s narrative as a source
for Othello and the significance of the differences between the two texts,
see Jonathan Burton, “‘Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be’:
Othello, Leo Africanus, and Muslim Ambassadors to Europe,” in Traffic
and Turning (Newark: University of Delaware, 2005), 233–56. As a
point of contrast, see also Lois Whitney, “Did Shakespeare Know Leo
Africanus?” PMLA, 37 (1922): 470–83.
53 For a variety of critical views on the significance of Moors in early
modern England, see G. K. Hunter, “Elizabethans and Foreigners,”
Shakespeare Survey, 17 (1964): 37–52; Anthony Barthelemy, Black
Face, Maligned Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1987); Emily Bartels, “Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and
the Construction of Africa,” Criticism, 34.4 (Fall 1992): 517–38; Hall,
Things of Darkness; Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian
Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,”
Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.4 (Winter 1998): 361–74; Ania Loomba,
“Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Shakespeare, eds. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147–66; and Bartels, Speaking of the
Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008).
According to the OED, in 1604 “Moor” could refer to (1) people indig-
enous to Mauritania in northwestern Africa; (2) people of a mixed Berber
and Arab race, Muslim in religion; (3) “Negroes,” dark-skinned people
who differ from lighter-skinned “tawny Moors”; and (4) generically,
Muslims, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent, thus a separate
group called “Indian Moors.” OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989.
54 Bartels, Speaking of the Moor, 5.
55 A sampling of Renaissance plays that depict Moors in diverse ways include
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice; Thomas
Dekker’s Lusts Dominion; Thomas Middleton’s All’s Lost By Lust; John
Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Nathan Field’s The Knight of Malta;
Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II; George
Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar; and John Webster’s The White Devil.
56 On Moors in the romance tradition, see Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New
York: Routledge, 2004). On the association of African Moors with
wisdom and nobility in the classical tradition of writers like Diodorus, see
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a reading of Othello
as a Morisco, see Barbara Everett, “‘Spanish’ Othello: The Making of
Shakespeare’s Moor,” Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982): 101–12.
57 The title of the play given in the 1623 folio catalogue is “Othello, the
Moore of Venice,” and in the 1622 quarto, “The Tragedy of Othello, the
Moor of Venice.”
58 Lupton, “Othello Circumcised”; and Daniel Vitkus, “Turning Turk in
Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare
Quarterly, 48 (1997): 145–76.
59 Ibid., 78.
60 Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 92.
62 Callaghan, “‘Othello was a white man’: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s
Stage,” in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Race and Gender
on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 75–96, esp. 79.
65 “Richard Eden to the reader,” Peter Martyr d’ Anghiera, The decades of
the Newe Worlde, trans. Richard Eden (London, 1555), sig. c3v.
66 Meredith Hanmer, The baptizing of a Turke. A sermon preached at the
hospitall of Saint Katherine the 2 of October, 1586 (London, 1586),
title page. (STC 12744) For a brief discussion of Hanmer’s sermon that
interprets his argument for converting Turks as anti-Catholic polemic, see
Matar, Islam in Britain, 126–9.
67 Matar, Islam in Britain, 126.
68 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, 719. (STC 11225)
69 Hanmer, sig. [A]3r-v.
70 Ibid., sig. f4r.
71 Ibid., sig. f4r.
72 See Porter, Reformation and Reaction, 371.
73 Ibid.
74 Reprinted from BL MS. Lansdowne No. 80, art. 65, in Cambridge
University Transactions During the Puritan Controversies of the 16th and
17th Centuries, collected by James Heywood and Thomas Wright, vol. II
(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 94.
75 For a reading of Othello as an allegorical commentary on the predestina-
tion debates, see Maurice Hunt, “Predestination and the Heresy of Merit
in Othello,” Comparative Drama, 30.3 (Fall 1996): 346–76. Hunt argues
that the injustice of Desdemona’s “non-election” to heaven casts the doc-
trine of predestination in an “unfavorable light” (369).
76 Valerie Traub has similarly called attention to the way Desdemona’s dead
body objectifies her chastity, but for Traub, this objectification is oppres-
sive in its move to contain the erotic threat of female sexuality. See Traub,
Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama
(London: Routledge, 1992), ch. 1.
77 As Mary Floyd-Wilson has shown, the association between coldness and
chastity also assumed a particular racial valence under the terms of geohu-
moralism, a climatic explanation of color and disposition grounded in the
composition of the body’s humors. Inherited from classical and medieval
traditions, geohumoralism associated England’s northern climate with
“intemperate” bodies, a culture that was “borrowed and belated,” and a
“barbarous” nature (4), but as Floyd-Wilson has argued, the early modern
period marked a “discursive rearrangement of [this] inherited knowledge”
in reorienting the intemperate coldness and pallid complexion of the
northern climate with qualities of fairness, civility, and self-control (13).
See Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race.
78 Other heroines who sustain their sexual chastity and their faith against
the pressures of lustful Turks and Moors include Perseda in Thomas
Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (c.1589); Bess in Thomas Heywood’s The
Fair Maid of the West, Part I (c.1604); Alizia in Robert Daborne’s A
Christian Turned Turke (c.1610), Ariana in John Fletcher’s The Knight
of Malta (c.1618); and Paulina in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado
(c.1624).
79 Vitkus, Turning Turk, 99.
80 This story was widely disseminated through William Painter’s Palace
of Pleasure (1566), Henry Wotton’s A courtlie controuersie of Cupids
cautels (1578), Richard Knolles’s Generall historie of the Turks (1603),
and William Barksted’s poem Hiren or The Faire Greeke (1611). It was
adapted on the stage in Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (c.1589),
George Peele’s (now lost) Turkish Mahomet and Hyrin the Fair Greek
(c.1594), Thomas Goffe’s The Courageous Turk (1618), Lodowick
Carlell’s Osmond the Great Turk (1622), and Gilbert Swinhoe’s Unhappy
Fair Irene (1640).
81 For a history of Cyprus, see George Hill, A History of Cyprus: The
Ottoman Province, the British Colony, 1571–1948, vol. 4 of 5 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1952).
82 Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum of Shakespeare (New
York: AMS Press, 1965).
83 Jones, “Othello, Lepanto and the Cyprus Wars,” Shakespeare Survey, 21
(1968): 47–52.
84 Richard Hakluyt, The principall nauigations, voiages and discoueries of
the English nation (London, 1589), 1:218.
85 Ibid., 2:130–1.
87 See, for example, Richard S. Veit, “‘Like the base Judean’: A Defense of an
Oft-Rejected Reading in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 26.4 (Autumn
1975): 466–9; and Edward Snow, “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of
Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980): 384–412.
90 Ibid., 16.
92 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 62.
93 Badiou, Saint Paul, 43.
Notes to Chapter 2
1 G. E. Bentley identifies 1620 as the earliest performance date with some

degree of certainty, on the basis of a sizable licensing fee paid to Sir George
Buck, Master of the Revels, on October 6, 1620. See The Jacobean and
Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 4:754. In this,
Bentley refutes F. G. Fleay’s speculation that Dekker first wrote the play in
1612 and that it appears in Henslowe’s records as the lost Dioclesian, later
to be revised by Massinger and retitled The Virgin Martyr. For this view,
see Fleay’s A Biographical Chronology of the English Drama, 1559–1642
(London, 1891), 212–13.
2 All quotations from the play are based on Phillip Massinger and Thomas
Dekker, The Virgin Martir, A Tragedie (London, 1622), STC 17644. Line
numbers correspond to Fredson Bowers’s critical edition of the play in
The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966).
3 On the suppression of medieval biblical drama and the complexly
achieved secularization of the theater in post-Reformation England, see
Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Patrick
Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1988); Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive
Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001); Paul White, Theatre and Reformation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993); Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946); and Glynne Wickham, Early
English Stages 1300–1660 (London: Routledge, 1980). Recently, studies
like Clopper’s seek to complicate the view that biblical drama was uni-
laterally suppressed in England, especially prior to the 1570s, and offer
evidence of the ways in which it persisted.
4 The record of the fee is made in Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book, which
contains some extracts from the otherwise scant records of George Buck,
Herbert’s predecessor as Master of the Revels. As Bentley notes, the spe-
cific amount of the fee indicates that it was paid for the licensing of a new
play which required revision, probably due to “censorable matter” (The
Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 3:265–6). Presumably, the play’s alignment
of the martyred heroine with certain Protestant sensibilities and her pagan
enemies with Marian persecutors constituted enough of a concession to
get the play past the censors.
5 I quote from Jose M. Ruano de la Haza, “Unparalleled Lives: Hagiographical
Drama in Seventeenth-Century England and Spain,” in Parallel Lives:
Spanish and English National Drama 1580–1680, eds. Louise Fothergill-
Payne and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1991), 257.
Clubb argues that the play bears an essential affinity to the Italian genre
of tragedia sacra, a product of the Continental Counter-Reformation,
and suggests that it appealed to Roman Catholics in England who could
identify with the persecuted Roman heroine. See “The Virgin Martyr
and the Tragedia Sacra,” Renaissance Drama, 7 (1964): 103–26. Other
critics who align the play with the Counter-Reformation include Uve
Christian Fischer, “Un drama martirologico barocco: The Virgin Martyr
di Philip Massinger,” Siculorum Gymnasium, 16 (1963): 1–19; Cyrus
Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in The Dramatic
Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1980–3), 3:181–8; and Walter Cohen, Drama of a
Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 375.
By contrast, Julia Gasper reads the play as Protestant propaganda; see
“The Virgin Martyr and the War in Germany,” in The Dragon and the
Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990),
136–65. Champion also rejects Clubb’s reading of play as Catholic; see
“Disaster With My So Many Joys: Structure and Perspective in Massinger
and Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama
in England, 1 (1984): 199–204, 200. More recently, Susannah Monta
has concurred with Gasper’s Protestant reading of the play, but also
argues that its depiction of a Catholic virgin martyr demonstrates the
flexibility of competing martyrological conventions in the early seven-
teenth century. See Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England
Critics who argue that the play’s religious content is superficial include
De la Haza; George Price, Thomas Dekker (New York: Twayne, 1969),
95–6; and Peter Mullany, “Religion in Massinger’s and Dekker’s The
Virgin Martyr,” Komos, 2 (1970): 89–97.
6 As discussed in the Introduction, notions of racial difference were in a
nascent state of development and highly unstable in the early modern
period. Though not yet signified by the term “race,” a set of differ-
ences was emerging that eventually came to comprise the modern cat-
egory. Thus, when I refer to “race” in the early modern period, I am
referring to an evolving and slippery notion of difference that was some-
times distinguished by skin color or taxonomies of darkness and fairness,
sometimes by humoral compositions dictated by geography and climate,
sometimes by the effects of diet, exercise, or cosmetics, sometimes by
physical marks like circumcision, and sometimes by a certain relationship
between internal temperament and external complexion. For a useful
discussion of how religious and bodily differences were complexly inter-
related in the early modern period, see Ania Loomba, “Religion, Colour,
and Racial Difference,” in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45–74.
7 Figure 2.1 is a well-known early modern map from the first Geneva
Bible (1560); it appears in the Newe Testament just after the Actes of
the Apostles and depicts countries and places that are mentioned in that
book. According to Lloyd Berry’s introduction to The Geneva Bible: A
Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1969), “A good case has been made for Thomas Dekker’s preference for
the Geneva Bible” (19).
8 Thomas Noble and Thomas Head, eds., Soldiers of Christ: Saints and
Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University
Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), xxi.
9 See Kirsten Wolf, “The Legend of Saint Dorothy: Medieval Vernacular
Renderings and their Latin Sources,” Analecta Bollandiana, 114 (1996):
41–72. See also Julia Gasper, “The Sources of The Virgin Martyr,” Review
of English Studies, 42.165 (1991): 17–31.
10 Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
11 For more detailed discussion of Dorothy’s legend in each of these sources,
see Wolf, “The Legend of Saint Dorothy,” and Gasper, “The Sources of
The Virgin Martyr.”
12 See Theodora Jankowski’s Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early
Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2000) on the subversive (or “queer”) signification of virginity in the early
modern period. Jankowski draws a clear distinction between premarital
virginity in a Protestant context and the Catholic validation of vowed vir-
ginity. Reading The Virgin Martyr in the former context, she argues that
the Protestant mandate against celibacy and the early modern valorization
of the patriarchal family rendered virginity a highly subversive choice in the
early modern period. For a broader theoretical discussion of the implica-
tions of virginity in early modern England, particularly with respect to ques-
tions of agency, see Kathryn Schwartz, “The Wrong Question: Thinking
Through Virginity,” differences, 13.2 (2002): 1–34. For a consideration of
early modern dramatic representations of virginity in relation to contem-
porary medical discourses, see Marie Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting
Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1997). Loughlin’s study focuses mainly on the plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher and does not consider the plays discussed in this chapter.
13 Reflecting a similar method of analysis, Linda McJannet has suggested
that the classical settings of Shakespeare’s Pericles and The Comedy of
Errors are partly informed by their contemporary resonance with the
Ottoman empire, which occupies the same geographical territory. See
Linda McJannet, “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in
Pericles and The Comedy of Errors,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and
Geography in English Renaissance Drama, eds. John Gillies and Virginia
Mason Vaughan (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 86–106. A
similar recognition of how the Old World is partially reinscribed by the
contemporary significance of its Mediterranean geography is reflected
in discussions of The Tempest and its setting. See for example Jerry
Brotton, “‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in The
Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba and Martin
Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 23–42.
14 Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political
Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993) offers a detailed history of the factors
that enabled England’s penetration of the eastern markets and the rise of
the joint stock companies.
15 The volume of the Calendar covering the years 1611–18 lists fifty-four
discrete entries under Turkish “Piracies” or “Pirates” (680). That number
jumps to ninety-six in the next volume covering the years 1619–23,
including substantial increases under the categories of “contributions for
the suppression of pirates” and “expeditions against pirates” (695). See
indexes of Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of
James I, 1611–18 and 1619–23, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London:
HMSO, 1858).
16 Calendar of State Papers, 1619–23: 393.
17 Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural
Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
esp. “Scenes of Conversion: Piracy, Apostasy, and the Sultan’s Seraglio,”
107–62. See also Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama,
Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), for an analysis of how the rapid
rise of global trade fostered English anxieties about foreign agents that
were manifested in discourses of bodily disease.
18 Jean Howard, “Gender on the Periphery,” in Shakespeare and the
Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare
Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001, eds. Tom Clayton, Susan
Brock, and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004),
344–62.
19 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and
European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
125.
20 For a related argument, see Jean Howard, “An English Lass Amid the
Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in Heywood’s The
Fair Maid of the West,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early
Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London:
Routledge, 1994), 101–17.
21 See Daniel Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity
Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001); see also Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the
Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
22 The conflation between castration and the cut of circumcision associated
with Muslims and Jews is a running joke on the early modern stage. Jonathan
Burton has argued that circumcision/castration and conversion in the drama
are almost always displaced onto clown figures as a way to disavow the
true allure and power of Islam, which he argues receives more accurate rep-
resentation in non-dramatic texts of the period. See “English Anxiety and
the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in
Early Modern Texts,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2 (2002):
35–67. In Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), James Shapiro offers an historical analysis of the common confla-
tion of circumcision and castration in early modern representations of Jews
and Jewish conversion; see esp. 114–17. For an insightful discussion of the
typological links between Jews and Muslims, see Julia Reinhard Lupton,
“Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,”
Representations, 57 (Winter 1997): 73–89.
23 Holly Pickett, “Dramatic Nostalgia and Spectacular Conversion in Dekker
and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr,” SEL, 1500–1900, 49.2 (Spring
2009), 437–62, esp. 440 and 441.
24 Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 194–216, esp. 196.
25 Foxe identifies his source for the primitive church as Eusebius’s
Ecclesiastical History. Foxe overtly rejects the Catholic sources, such as
Jacobus’s Legenda aurea, through which stories of early Christian martyrs
had been widely disseminated in the Middle Ages.
26 Actes and Monuments (1570), 1:273.
27 John R. Knott offers a detailed analysis of Foxe’s use of the persecution
of the primitive church as a precedent for contemporary narratives of
martyrdom. See Knott, “Heroic Suffering,” in Discourses of Martyrdom
in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 33–83. James Knapp has also discussed Foxe’s reliance
on historical precedent and specifically the chronicles of Eusebius to
provide an “analogue to the current strife in the Christian world.” See
Knapp, “Stories and Icons: Reorienting the Visual in John Foxe’s Acts
and Monuments,” in Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The
Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003),
124–206, esp. 131. On the illustrations in Foxe and early modern print
culture, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
28 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and
Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997). Diehl’s argument on this point may be seen to concur
with Eamon Duffy’s influential claim that English Protestantism was
largely based on Catholic forms and that more continuities exist between
Catholicism and Protestantism than we typically acknowledge. Duffy, The
Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
29 Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, 45.
30 Actes and Monuments (1570), 3:1418–19.
31 Caroline Walker Bynum has written of the “peculiarly bodily” nature of
medieval spirituality: the saint was defined not by overcoming but by har-
nessing her body – by enduring illness, by self-flagellation, by fasting. See
“The Female Body and Religious Practice in Later Middle Ages,” in
Fragments for a History of the Human Body I, eds. Michel Feher, Ramona
Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 161–219. See also
Bynum’s discussion of the late medieval “heightened concern with matter,
with corporeality, with sensuality” and the accompanying emphasis on
the Eucharist as sufferance and bleeding flesh, and on the “bodiliness of
Christ’s humanity,” in Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), esp. 250–9.
32 Reprinted in Elaine V. Beilin, ed., The Examinations of Anne Askew
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Despite overall congruity
between Bale’s (1546, 1547) and Foxe’s editions, Bale’s introduction was
omitted from the first edition of Actes and Monuments and all subsequent
editions. For a detailed analysis of the editorial differences between Bale’s
and Foxe’s treatment of Askew, see Thomas Freeman and Sarah Wall,
“Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001): 1165–96.
33 Beilin, The Examinations of Anne Askew, 11.
34 Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England, 134, 160.
35 “Martyr,” n. 2.a. OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989.
36 Antonio Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio, e delle varie
maniere di martoriare vsata da’ gentili contro christiani, descritte et intag-
liate in rame (Rome, 1591). The original copper plates for these images
featured the designs of Giovanni de Guerra, painter to Pope Sixtus V,
and were engraved by Antonio Tempesta. Following the original Italian
edition, a Latin edition of Gallonio’s text was printed in Rome in 1594
and in Antwerp in 1600. The first English translation was prepared by
A. R. Allison under the title Tortures and Torments of the Christian
Martyrs (New York: Walden, 1939). A newly illustrated edition based
on Allison’s translation was published by the alternative Feral House and
marketed as erotica (Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs: The
Classic Martyrology [Los Angeles, 2004]).
37 Another popular Counter-Reformation martyrology was Richard
Verstegan’s Theatre des cruautes des heretiques de notre temps (Antwerp,
1587). Available in numerous editions throughout the early seventeenth
century and marketed as a “theatre” of (Protestant) heretical cruelty,
Verstegan’s book contained similarly graphic depictions of different
methods of bodily penetration and other tortures, each image a kind of
stage vignette.
38 “Habitation” refers to a physical “place of abode or residence” (n., 2) and
the related “habit,” denoting “bodily apparel or attire” (n., 1.a.), suggests
material worn on the outside of the body that both defines and conforms
to its external contours. OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989. For a discussion of
clothing and its material construction of early modern subjecthood, see
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
39 As described in Allison’s English translation of Gallonio, the brazen
bull was “a most exceeding cruel sort of punishment in use among the
Ancients, into the which . . . anyone that was to be tortured was cast by an
opening or door that was in its side. Then the door being shut to again, a
fire was lighted about the bull, causing those imprisoned therein to suffer
unexampled agonies, and by their lamentations and cries to imitate the
bellowing of a bull” (123).
40 Claire Sponsler also links these acts of violence in discussing the medi-
eval spectacle of violated bodies and how it opened a space of resistance
to contemporary ideologies of social wholeness. See “Violated Bodies:
The Spectacle of Suffering in Corpus Christi Pageants,” in Drama and
Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 136–60.
41 On the trope of ineffective or clownish torturers in the medieval Corpus
Christi pageants, see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 175–205.
42 See Nova Myhill, “Making Death a Miracle: Audience and the Genres
of Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr,” Early
Theatre, 7.2 (2004): 9.
43 See Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2000), for a reading of The Virgin Martyr as “sadomaso-
chistic pornography,” 53. Other critics have discussed the erotic appeal of
medieval virgin martyr legends and mystery passion plays, also comparing
them to pornography. See for example Karen Winstead, Chaste Passions:
Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000), 3. Sheila Delany seeks to complicate the association of
medieval martyrology with pornography or “masculinist voyeuristic
sadism” in “Last Things and Afterlives,” in Impolitic Bodies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 186.
44 See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 3rd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a discussion of how the large,
open amphitheater of the Red Bull lent itself to “lavishly staged plays” and
battle scenes in the vein of Tamburlaine (190). See also Gurr’s Playgoing
in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
on the Red Bull’s reputation for low theatrical standards, its less than
respectable location, and its appeal to “citizens, and the meaner sort of
people” (185).
45 The quotation from The Renegado comes from Three Turk Plays
from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), 4.2.49–50.
46 Edward Kellet and Henry Byam, A retvrne from Argier: A semon preached
at Minhead in the county of Somerset the 16 of March, 1627 at the re-
admission of a relapsed Christian into our chvrch (London, 1628), 76;
Charles Fitzgeoffrey, Compassion towards captives chiefly towards our
brethren and country-men who are in miserable bondage in Barbarie.
Vrged and pressed in three sermons on Heb. 13.3. Preached in Plymouth,
in October 1636 (Oxford, 1637); and William Gouge, A Recovery from
apostacy. Set out in a sermon preached in Stepny church neere London
at the receiving of a penitent renegado into the church, Oct. 21, 1638
(London, 1639).
47 Christopher Angelos, Christopher Angell, A Grecian, who tasted of many
stripes inflicted by the Turkes (Oxford, 1617), A4r.
48 Ibid., A4v.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Francis Knight, A relation of seaven yeares slaverie under the Turkes of
Argeire, suffered by an English captive merchant (London, 1640).
52 Ibid., 6.
53 Similar accounts of torture inflicted by Turks include those of John
Rawlins in The famous and wonderfull recoverie of a ship of Bristoll
(London, 1622), and Sir Henry Blount, A voyage into the Levant (London,
1636), esp. 52.
54 Mundy’s manuscript, entitled Itinerarium Mundii, records the author’s
travels between 1608 and 1667 and includes an account of his stay in
Constantinople from 1617 to 1620.
55 Bynum, “The Female Body,” 175.
56 A large body of criticism explores the importance and function of virgin-
ity in the Middle Ages. These studies have uncovered the ways in which
virgin martyr legends provided moral guidance for both anchoresses
and lay readers and how celibacy offered medieval women a means of
autonomy that was at once empowering and disabling. See, for example,
Katherine Lewis, “Model Girls? Virgin-Martyrs and the Training of
Young Women in Late Medieval England,” in Young Medieval Women,
eds. Katherine Lewis, Noel James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 25–46; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The
Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature, eds.
Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 165–94;
Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2001); Julie Hassel, Choosing Not to Marry: Women and
Autonomy in the Katherine Group (New York and London: Routledge,
2002); and Ruth Evans, “Virginities,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Women’s Writing, eds. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace
57 Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 211.
58 Ibid., 208.
59 Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 32.
60 John Barclay, The mirrour of mindes, or, Barclays Icon animorum
(London, 1631), rpt. 1633; first published in Latin, 1614; 289. The refer-
ence appears in ch. 9, “Turkes and Iewes.”
61 Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early
Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Hendricks
and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period,
33–54, 45.
62 This description comes from its manuscript flyleaf (v). Though appar-
ently popular as a performance piece, the play was never printed in the
seventeenth century. My quotations are based upon Rebecca G. Rhoads’s
Malone Society edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).
63 Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern
English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), esp. ch. 4; and James Kearney,
The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
64 Kearney, The Incarnate Text, 2, 3.
65 See, for example, the debate between John Salkeld, A treatise of angels
(London, 1613), and John Boys, An exposition of the festivall epistles
and gospels . . . the third part (London, 1615). Salkeld, a Jesuit-trained
writer who later converted to Protestantism, offers a full-blown celebra-
tion of Thomistic angelology, particularly with regard to “assisting
and protecting angels,” whereas Boys cites John Calvin’s rejection of
personal angels and argues further that the Bible does not substanti-
ate any belief in personal angels. For Calvin’s objection to the divinity
of angels, see The institution of Christian religion, wrytten in Latine
by maister Ihon Calvin, and translated into Englysh according to the
authors last edition, trans. Thomas Norton (London, 1561), I.xiv.3,
fol. 44r. For a modern critical discussion of the idolatrous associations
of angels, see Alexandra Walsham, “Angels and Idols in England’s
Long Reformation,” in Angels in the Early Modern World, eds. Peter
Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 134–67.
66 Holly Crawford Pickett, “Angels in England: Idolatry and Wonder at
the Red Bull Playhouse,” in Thunder at a Playhouse: Proceedings from
the Fourth Blackfriars Conference, eds. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2010), 175–99. Many
thanks to Holly for sharing her insightful essay with me before it went to
press.
67 For a broader discussion of male heroism in the seventeenth century that
argues that it was redefined to privilege endurance over action, see Mary
Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Notes to Chapter 3
1 See Malieckal, “‘Wanton Irreligious Madness’: Conversion and Castration

in Massinger’s The Renegado,” Essays in Arts and Sciences, 31 (October,
2002): 18–36; Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and
European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
ch. 5; Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in
Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004), ch. 6; Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama,
1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), chs. 2
and 3; Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural
Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), ch.
5; and Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and
the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008), ch. 5.
2 Critics who focus on the Catholic elements of The Renegado and/or argue
for Massinger’s Catholicism include William Gifford, “Introduction,”
in The Plays of Philip Massinger, 4 vols. (London, 1805); Frederick
Boas, An Introduction to Stuart Drama (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946), 308; Maurice Chelli, Le Drame de Massinger (Lyon: M.
Audin, 1923), 328; Alfred Cruickshank, Philip Massinger (New York:
Frederic A. Stokes, 1920), 3; and Thomas Dunn, Philip Massinger: The
Man and the Playwright (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957), 191. For a
succinct overview of these findings, concluding that Massinger’s use of
religion simulates the serious tone of Fletcherian tragicomedy, see Peter
Mullany, “Massinger’s The Renegado: Religion in Stuart Tragicomedy,”
Genre, 5.1 (1972): 138–52. For a reading that argues in opposition that
the play is anti-Catholic, presenting the Muslim characters as stand-ins
for demonized Catholics, see Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender
Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), esp. 175–84.
3 All citations of the play are from Three Turk Plays from Early Modern
England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
This edition is based on the first printed edition of the play, published in
1630.
4 While Francisco’s wearing of the cope fell within the mandates of the
established church, the prop also cited a history of controversy over
vestments and represented a Protestant concession to an older Catholic
tradition. Debate over vestments emerged during Queen Elizabeth’s reign,
with one side arguing for uniformity in the wearing of Eucharistic vest-
ments and the other side objecting to them because of their association
with “popish” ceremonies. For an overview of the controversy, see Patrick
Collinson, “That Comical Dress” and “The People and the Pope’s Attire”
in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967; repr., Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990), 71–83 and 92–7. James’s injunction of 1604 concerning
the use of the cope reveals the enduring Catholic stigma that made some
clergy reluctant to conform in the wearing of vestments. See Canon 24,
Constitvtions and canons ecclesiasticall, treated vpon by the bishop of
London (London, 1604).
5 Metzger’s discussion of Jessica’s conversion to Christianity in The
Merchant of Venice offers interesting anticipations of the gender dynam-
ics that I observe in The Renegado; see Mary Janell Metzger, “‘Now by
My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and
the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity.” PMLA, 113.1 (January
1998): 52–63. Although I resist any direct equation between Jewish-
Christian conversion and Muslim-Christian conversion, I perceive strong
parallels between the two plays in their representations of the colluding
logics of gender, religious difference, and race that influence the terms of
conversion. Drawing upon earlier work by Kim Hall and Lynda Boose,
Metzger argues that Jessica is crucially distinguished from Shylock as
a candidate for conversion, particularly by her whiteness and female
gender, which “make possible her reproduction as a Christian” through
Lorenzo’s choice to marry her (57). For a subsequent discussion of the
play that expands upon Metzger’s argument and also departs from it by
emphasizing the limitations of Jessica’s conversion, see Janet Adelman,
“Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of
Venice,” Representations, 81 (Winter 2003): 4–30.
6 Other plays in which conversion to Islam is presented as a sexual threat
include Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (c.1589); Thomas Dekker’s
Lust’s Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen (c.1600); John Mason’s The
Turk (c.1607); Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610);
and John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Massinger’s The Knight of Malta
(c.1618).
7 See Gifford, “Introduction,” xliv. For a useful overview of Massinger’s
Spanish sources, see Warner Rice, “The Sources of Massinger’s The
Renegado,” Philological Quarterly, 11.1 (1932): 65–75. The Renegado is
loosely based on Cervantes’s “Story of the Captive” in Don Quixote (1605),
part i, book IV, chs. 12–14, and on his play Los Baños de Argel (1615).
8 Michael Neill, “Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and
Tragicomic Form in Massinger’s The Renegado,” in Early Modern
Tragicomedy, eds. Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2007), 154–74, 174. Many thanks to Michael Neill for sharing his
then unpublished essay with me as I was completing the final version of
this chapter.
9 Benedict Robinson, “The Turks, Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s
The Renegado,” in Localizing Caroline Drama, eds. Adam Zucker and
Alan Farmer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 213–38. A revised
version of his essay appears in his Islam and Early Modern English
Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 117–43.
10 Jean Howard, “Gender on the Periphery,” in Shakespeare and the
Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare
Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001, eds. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock,
and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 344–62,
349.
11 Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turke: or, The tragicall lives and
deaths of the two famous pirates, Ward and Dansiker (London, 1612).
The plays have other similarities as well: both are set in the city of Tunis,
and both include a priestly counselor named Francisco.
12 As discussed in Chapter 1, this doctrine held that all souls were pre-divided
between election to heaven and reprobation to hell, and that both fates
were completely reliant on the will of God, impervious to good works or
individual will. The doctrine of predestination was first outlined by the
English Church in Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church
of England (1563). It was then more explicitly defined in the Lambeth
Articles, devised by Archbishop John Whitgift in 1596.
13 Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, 41–2, and Turning Turk, 159. For a related
discussion of how The Renegado “rewrites/rerights” A Christian Turned
Turke, see Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk and
its ‘Pauline’ Rerighting,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2.1
(2002): 21–7.
14 See especially Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Vitkus, Turning Turk; and Fuchs,
Mimesis and Empire.
15 Whereas Elizabeth implicitly sanctioned English privateering and the
plundering of Spanish galleys on the Barbary coast, James proclaimed
an official suspension of English privateering in June of 1603. See “A
Proclamation Against Pirates,” issued January 8, 1609, reprinted in
Stuart Royal Proclamations, eds. James Larkin and Paul Hughes, 3
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1:203–6. For an account of
James’s attempt to combat Barbary piracy, see David Hebb, Piracy
and the English Government, 1616–42 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994).
See also Kenneth Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime
Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Godfrey Fisher, Barbary Legend:
War, Trade, and Piracy in North Africa, 1415–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957).
16 Burton suggests that early modern plays represented castration in comedic
ways in order to assuage English anxieties about the emasculation of
English men and the serious threat posed by Christian conversion to
Islam. See his “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five
Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies, 2 (2002): 35–67.
17 This is not to suggest that Protestants never translated the threat of
Catholicism into sexual and embodied terms; indeed, the metaphor of
the Whore of Babylon did powerful work in associating Catholics with
pathologies such as syphilis, also known as the “Romish sickness” or the
“French pox.” Nevertheless, the Whore of Babylon, and Catholics more
generally, were typically not associated with entrapping potential con-
verts through sexual seduction, as were Muslim Turks. Thomas Dekker’s
Whore of Babylon (1606) offers a clear dramatic example of how the
Catholic Whore of Babylon functions as a figurative rather than a literal
“whore.”
18 John Stradling, Beauti pacifici (London, 1623).
19 Ibid., 18.
20 Francisco is identified as “a Jesuite” under the Dramatis Personae in the
earliest edition of the play (1630).
21 See, for example, John Gee, The foot out of the snare (London, 1624),
which vehemently argued for the banning of Jesuits from England. In
response to the controversy, King James issued a royal proclamation
banning Jesuits on May 6, 1624; see Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1:591–3.
For an overview of the events associated with the royal Proclamation,
see Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the
Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), esp. 288–9. See also Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and
the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), esp. 113–18.
22 See Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion.”
23 Drawing upon Alain Grosrichard’s discussion of the “absurd economy”
of non-convertible commodities in early modern European fantasies of
the Orient (The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz
Heron [London: Verso, 1998], 68), Harris links Carazie’s impotence with
the pathological hoarding of treasure that disrupts the healthy circulation
of trade. See Harris, Sick Economies, 156–61. Forman similarly focuses on
the economic dimensions of The Renegado’s threat of castration, arguing
that the eunuch is a figure for the complete obstruction of trade, which the
play resolves through its redemptive embracing of a restrained and ethical
form of circulation; see Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions. I thank Valerie
Forman for sharing her then unpublished manuscript with me while I was
completing revisions for this chapter.
24 Catholic relics (as well as icons and images) and their denunciation in
post-Reformation England are the subjects of an extensive critical dis-
course. See, for example, Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History
of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); John Phillips, The Reformation of
Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1973); and Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of
the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
25 Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-
Century Print Culture(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 27.
26 See, for example, Andreas Vesalius, Epistola rationem modumque propi-
nandi radicis Chynae decocti (Letter on the China Root; Basel, 1546),
and De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543). Vesalius’s anatomical
illustrations informed a number of subsequent medical texts published
in England, including Thomas Geminus’s Compendiosa totius anatomiae
delineatio (London, 1545) and Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia:
A description of the body of man (London, 1615). For a discussion of
anxieties surrounding the existence and function of the hymen in these
and other texts, see Marie Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity
on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997),
esp. 27–52.
27 “Maidenhead,” n1 1.a. OED Online, 2nd ed., 1989.
28 As Vitkus glosses, Manto’s reference to passing as “current” draws an
analogy between passing for a virgin and passing for a “genuine coin.” See
OED Online, “current” 5.
29 See Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of
Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
3–63; Jonathan Gil Harris, “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of
Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.4 (Winter 2001): 479–91.
30 As Ania Loomba has argued, the stage’s propensity to Christianize
Muslim women and marry them to Christian men is fostered by England’s
political interests in mastery and colonialism. See Loomba, “‘Delicious
Traffick’: Racial and Religious Difference on Early Modern Stages,”
in Shakespeare and Race, eds. Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 203–15, and “‘Break her
will, and bruise no bone, sir’: Colonial and Sexual Mastery in Fletcher’s
The Island Princess,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2.1
(2002): 68–108.
31 For a related argument that The Renegado uses the rescue of a Muslim
princess to help assuage domestic anxieties about threatened masculinity
in the early modern period, see Burton, Traffic and Turning, chs. 2 and
3. Burton contends that Islam and women produced parallel anxieties for
English men in the period.
32 For a detailed overview of post-Reformation debates about baptism in
England, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion,
and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 97–194.
33 For a reading that relates this scene to the topos of washing the Ethiope
white, see Anston Bosman, “‘Best Play with Mardian’: Eunuch and
Blackamoor as Imperial Culturegram,” Shakespeare Studies, 34 (2006):
123–57, 147.
34 See John Whitgift, The defense of the aunswere to the admonition against
the replie of T.C. (London, 1574). For a summary of reformers’ objections
to lay baptism argued at the Hampton Court Conference, see William
Barlow, The summe and substance of the conference (London, 1604), esp.
14–20. King James adopted a middle position that condoned baptisms
outside of the church in cases of dire necessity, but restricted the perform-
ance of baptisms to lawful ministers (Barlow, Summe and substance, 8).
For an overview of the debate, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death,
117–23.
35 At the Hampton Court Conference, several bishops argued that “the
administration of baptism, by women, and lay-persons, was not allowed in
the practice of the Church” because it suggested a popish practice (Barlow,
Summe and substance, 14). For earlier debate on the subject, see Whitgift,
The defense of the aunswere to the admonition, 29, 504, 509, 516, 793.
I am grateful to Joseph Black for drawing my attention to these passages
in Whitgift’s polemical exchange with Thomas Cartwright. For a critical
discussion of the cultural role of the midwife in performing baptisms and
other duties, see Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), esp. 127–60.
36 Robinson identifies this allusion to Tasso in “The ‘Turks,’ Caroline
Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado,” 229.
37 The Statutes of the Realm from the Beginning to the End of the Reign of
King Henry VIII (A.D. 1509–10 to A.D. 1545), vol. 3 (London, 1817), ch.
24, 778.
38 Malieckal, “‘Wanton Irreligious Madness,’” 25–6. Intended to redeem
thousands of Christian captives who had been captured and enslaved by
Barbary corsairs, the attack was thwarted by bad weather and a second
attempt was supported by Ottoman forces. For a historical account of the
attack, see Fisher, Barbary Legend, 114. For a contemporary report of the
mission, led by Sir Robert Mansell, see John Button, Algiers voyage, in a
journall or briefe reportary of all occurrents (London, 1621).
39 Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (London, 1625), 152. Even
earlier, there is evidence of theologians advocating a via media between
Protestantism and Catholicism. Richard Hooker pushed for acknowledg-
ing the legitimate status of the Catholic church, arguing that by drawing
near to Islam “we should be spreaders of a worse infection . . . than any
we are likely to draw from papists by our conformity with them in cer-
emonies”; see The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, book IV, ch. vii, in The
Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill,
6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977–98), 1:297.
40 On James’s support of Laud’s early career, see Charles Carlton, Archbishop
William Laud (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), esp. 27. On the
history of the rise of Arminianism (the religious doctrine of the Dutch
theologian Jacobus Arminius) in England, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-
Calvinists: The Rise of Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987); Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church
in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982);
Peter White, “The Rise of English Arminianism Reconsidered,” Past and
Present, 101 (1983): 34–54; and Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English
Church, 1570–1635,” Past and Present, 114 (1987): 32–76.
41 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists.
42 In a similar vein, Pauline Croft argues that the breakdown of Calvinism
was not just accomplished through the high church clerical cabal, but was
also carried out by laymen such as Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury; see
Croft, “The Religion of Robert Cecil,” Historical Journal, 34.4 (1991):
773–96.
43 For this line of thinking I am indebted to Debora Shuger’s thoughtful
response to a panel I organized along with Elizabeth Williamson for the
Modern Language Association conference in 2003. The panel was titled
“Contested Objects: Religious Upheaval, Catholic Idols, and Body Parts
on the Renaissance Stage.”
44 For a historical study of the use of blackface on English stages between 1500
and 1800, see Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English
Stages, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
45 Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early
Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Women,
“Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks
and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 33–54, 45.
46 Reprinted in Daniel Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary
Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), appendix 5.
47 Edward Kellet and Henry Byam, A returne from Argier (London, 1628),
opposite title page.
48 Ibid., 43, 41, 44.
49 Ibid., 42.
50 See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars:
Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992).
51 I am especially grateful to the students in my graduate seminar on
“Tragicomedy” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped
me to reach new conclusions about the significance of this scene.
52 Anthony Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” in Shakespeare
and the Cultures of Performance, eds. Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 83–97, 88.
53 Ibid., 87–8.
54 Ibid., 84.
55 Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern
English Studies,” Criticism, 46.1 (Winter 2004): 167–90, 167.
Notes to Chapter 4
1 The Statutes of the Realm from the Beginning to the End of the Reign of
King Henry VIII (A.D. 1509–10 to A.D. 1545), vol. 3 (London, 1817), ch.
24, 778.
2 Thomas Fuller, The historie of the holy warre (London, 1639), 47.
3 In addition to appearing in the five plays I discuss here, the Knights
of Malta make a brief appearance in John Webster’s The White
Devil (1612), when they take part in the ceremony of electing a new
pope. There is also an appearance of a Knight of Rhodes in the play-
within-a-play of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587); the scene
in question corresponds to a story portrayed quite differently in Kyd’s
Soliman and Perseda.
4 On pan-Christian alliance and the rhetoric of the “common corps of
Christendom,” see Franklin Baumer, “England, the Turk, and the Common
Corps of Christendom,” American Historical Review, (1945): 27–8; and
Molly Greene, “Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the
Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present, 174 (2000): 42–71.
5 One exception is Peter Mullany, who notes the popularity of the Knights
of Malta on the English stage and briefly discusses these plays. See
“The Knights of Malta in Renaissance Drama,” Bulletin of the Modern
Language Society, 74 (1973): 297–301. Mullany attributes the appearance
of the Knights to “considerable interest in the East as well as to [their]
historical importance” (297).
6 See Raphael Holinshed, “The First Book of the History of England,”
Chronicles, vol. 1 of 4 (London, 1587). As Margreta de Grazia has
observed, the first volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles, a crucial source of
history for many early modern playwrights, organizes British history into
four periods of foreign rule. See Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57. De Grazia persuasively argues that
this understanding of British history meant that “in 1600, England could
still consider itself in the Fourth or Norman Rule, and its submission to a
fifth was not unimaginable” (57).
7 See Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy,
1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006);
Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease
in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004); and Amanda Bailey, “Custom, Debt, and the Valuation of Service
in Early Modern England,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English
Drama, eds. Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2010), 304–36. On London immigration and racial anxieties, see Emily
Bartels, “Too Many Blackamoores: Deportation, Discrimination, and
Elizabeth I,” SEL, 46.2 (Spring 2006): 305–22. Bartels usefully illustrates
how restrictions on the immigration of racialized subjects were inter-
twined with other foreign political relationships.
8 There have been many historical treatments of the Knights of Malta. See
for example Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2001); Jonathan Riley-Smith, Hospitallers: The History
of the Order of St. John (London: Hambledon Press, 1999); Anthony
Luttrell, The Hospitallers of Rhodes and Their Mediterranean World
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992); and Henry J. A. Sire, The Knights of Malta
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
9 Palmira Brummett, “The Overrated Adversary: Rhodes and Ottoman
Naval Power,” Historical Journal, 36.3 (1993): 517–41.
10 Brian Blouet, A Short History of Malta (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1967), 53.
11 For a history of Malta that emphasizes the formation of a Maltese national
identity not shaped exclusively through the Knights, see Carmel Cassar,
Society, Culture, and Identity in Early Modern Malta (Msida: Mireva,
2000).
12 Aaron Kitch, “Shylock’s Sacred Nation,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 59.2
(Summer 2008): 131–55, 144. See also Ernle Bradford, The Great Siege:
Malta, 1565 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961).
13 For a bibliography of primary and secondary sources relating to English
responses to the siege of Malta, see Helen Vella Bonavita, ed., Caelivs
Secundus Curio, His Historie of the Warr of Malta, Trans. Thomas
Mainwaringe (1579), Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies vol.
339 (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2007). For an informative discussion of many
of these sources that extends Bonavita’s analysis of the early modern dis-
cursive construction of Malta, see Bernadette Andrea, “From Invasion to
Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England,” in Remapping the
Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V.
Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 245–71.
14 For a thoroughly documented history of the English langue of the Knights
of Malta, see Gregory O’Malley, The Knights Hospitaller of the English
Langue, 1460–1565 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
15 Statutes of the Realm, 3:780–1.
16 Andrea, “From Invasion to Inquisition,” 250.
17 Fuller, Historie of the holy warre, 239.
18 Ibid., 254.
19 For an extended passage on the Knights’ superstitions about relics, see
ibid., 128. Fuller cites as one of many examples of the Knights’ basis in
superstition the well-known story of their mythological origins involv-
ing a Frenchman named Peter the Hermit, who assembled an army under
the pope and won a decisive battle at Antioch by virtue of a bloody lance
believed to be the same spear that wounded Christ on the cross. In a
mocking tone, Fuller goes on to indulge a “merry digression” about a chest
of relics that King Richard redeemed from the Turks in Palestine. Marveling
at their mysterious propensity to multiply, “so that the head of the same
Saint is shewed at several places” and the only possible explanation could
be “synecdoche,” Fuller sarcastically demonstrates how the relic’s repro-
duction reveals its forgery and the profitable business behind it.
20 Ibid., 47.
21 William Davies, A true relation of the travailes and most miserable captiui-
tie of William Dauies, barber-surgion of London (London, 1614), D3v.
22 George Sandys, Relations of Africa . . . obserued in his iourney, begun
Ann. 1610, as excerpted in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes
(London, 1625), STC 20509. Sandys’s description of Malta appears in vol.
2:915–20.
23 Sandys, Relations of Africa, 919.
24 Melissa Sanchez discusses a similar dynamic in Edmund Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene, in which the “feminine, private quality of Chastity”
serves as a model for masculine virtue, friendship, and a just state. See
“Fantasies of Friendship in The Faerie Queene, Book IV,” English Literary
Renaissance, 37.2 (Spring 2007): 250–73, 250.
25 Quotations from Soliman and Perseda are taken from The Tragedye of
Solyman and Perseda, ed. John Murray (New York: Garland, 1991).
26 Lisa Celovsky, “Early Modern Masculinities and The Faerie Queen,”
English Literary Renaissance, 35.2 (Spring 2005): 210–47. Celovsky’s
exploration of the gendered category of knighthood in The Faerie Queen
offers an excellent explication of the conventions of knighthood, as
established through the epic and romance traditions. The plays I examine
appropriate and refigure these conventions in order to grapple with con-
temporary threats of religious and racial difference.
27 Arthur Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the
Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1960). See also Ferguson’s The Chivalric Tradition
in Renaissance England (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses,
1986). For other discussions of chivalry in the Renaissance and its
medieval legacy, see Alex Davis, Chivalry and Romance in the English
Renaissance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003); Sydney Anglo, ed., Chivalry
in the Renaissance (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990); and Maurice Keen,
Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
28 Lukas Erne, Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of
Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 193. In
ch. 8, Erne offers an extended analysis of the ways in which Kyd’s play
departs from its primary source.
29 For a more general discussion of the blazon as an act of male violence and
possession, see Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman
and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (Winter 1981): 265–79. Kim
Hall plays off of Vickers’s discussion of the blazon to draw a connection
between Petrarchan imagery and the construction of whiteness; see Things
of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 2.
30 The probability that Soliman was performed in dark makeup is supported
by the depiction of a figure in blackface on the title page of Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy, wherein Soliman and Perseda constitutes a play-within-
the-play.
31 Queen Elizabeth actively pursued trade and diplomatic intercourse with
the Ottoman empire. Having opened formal trade relations with the
Ottoman Porte in 1578, she granted a charter to the Levant Company in
1592. In addition, she sought naval aid from the Turks against the pressing
Spanish threat. In 1582, she dispatched an embassy to Sultan Murad II in
the hopes of establishing an alliance with the Ottomans against Spain. For
an analysis of shifting Anglo-Ottoman relations under Elizabeth and cor-
responding dramatic representations of the Turk, see Matthew Dimmock,
New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern
England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
32 Henry Wotton, A courtlie controuersie of Cupids cautels (London, 1578),
K2r.
33 Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural
Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 126.
34 For a discussion of the dating of Soliman and Perseda and The Jew of
Malta in relation to one another, see Erne, Beyond the Spanish Tragedy,
159. Erne suggests, on the basis of The Jew of Malta’s allusion to the
siege of Rhodes as a battle that the Christians refused to surrender – an
interpretation that replicates Kyd’s play – The Jew of Malta likely post-
dated Soliman and Perseda. Erne dates Soliman and Perseda’s composi-
tion in 1588 or 1589, and The Jew of Malta’s composition in 1589 or
1590.
35 Emily Bartels, “Malta: The Jew of Malta, and the Fictions of Difference,”
English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990): 1–16. Aaron Kitch also reads
Ferneze’s willingness to submit to Spain as a sign of his “religious and
political hypocrisy,” which is motivated by his economic interest in avoid-
ing payment of tribute to Spain. See “Shylock’s Sacred Nation,” 144.
36 Bartels, “Malta,” 8.
37 Quotations from The Jew of Malta are taken from Christopher Marlowe:
Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, eds. David Bevington and Eric
Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 247–322.
38 From this reference, Mark Hutchings argues that Ithamore is “a victim of
the Ottoman policy of recruiting by force Christian boys from the Balkans
and converting them to Islam to serve in either the Turkish military or
the Ottoman government” (Notes and Queries, 47.4 [December 2000]:
428–30, esp. 429).
39 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 63.
40 Phyllis Rackin, “The Lady’s Reeking Breath,” in Shakespeare and Women
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
41 Quotation from The Merchant of Venice is taken from The Complete
Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Longman,
2004).
42 Stevie Simkin, A Preface to Marlowe (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000),
158.
43 Zachary Lesser, “Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty,
Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy,” ELH, 74 (2007): 881–908,
883.
44 Dena Goldberg argues that Barabas is in fact sacrificed solely to save
Malta from Turkish domination, thus contributing to a larger sacri-
fice motif that runs throughout the play; see “Sacrifice in Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta,” SEL, 32.2 (1992): 233–45. Similarly, David Riggs
argues that “Marlowe’s Antichrist [Barabas] literally perishes for the
common good. His stolen wealth ransoms the Maltese Christians from
the Turk; his sacrificial death in Act Five redeems Malta from the pagan
[sic] foe that holds it in bondage”; see “Double Agents,” in The World
of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 250–73, esp.
266.
45 On the dating of The Knight of Malta’s earliest performance, see G. E.
Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956), 3:352–3. Bentley bases his estimate on the cast list printed
in the 1679 folio, which includes Nathan Field and Richard Burbage. The
performance date must fall between 1616, when Field joined the King’s
Men, and 1618, when Burbage died.
46 For more a detailed discussion of James’s foreign policies and their reli-
gious implications, see James Doelman, King James I and the Religious
Culture of England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000).
47 Quotations from The Knight of Malta are taken from The Dramatic
Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. George Walton Williams,
gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966), 8:360–465.
48 For a broader discussion of the cultural function of the duel in early
modern England, see Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity
in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003). Surveying a range of plays and other textual representations of
dueling, Low argues that the duel functioned as “an overdetermined sign
of masculine identity that helped to stabilize significantly volatile notions
of both rank and gender” (3).
49 Bertha Hensman, The Shares of Fletcher, Field and Massinger in Twelve
Plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Salzburg Studies in English
Literature, Jacobean Drama Studies 6 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg,
1974), 71–5.
50 Ania Loomba “‘Delicious Traffick’: Racial and Religious Difference on
Early Modern Stages,” in Shakespeare and Race, eds. Catherine Alexander
and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 216.
51 William Segar, Honor military, and ciuill contained in foure bookes
(London, 1602), book 2, ch. 20, 96.
52 Segar, Honor military, and ciuill, 97.
53 Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English
Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). This important study explores the
significance of religious stage properties on the English public stage. See
especially ch. 3 on crosses and crucifixes.
54 In fact, by the end of the play, it is revealed that Lucinda has already
undergone Christian conversion in Constantinople and married a
Christian husband, who turns out to be the disguised Angelo. For further
discussion of the distinction between Zanthia and Lucinda, see Bindu
Malieckal, “‘Hell’s Perfect Character’: The Black Woman as the Islamic
Other in Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta,” Essays in Arts and Sciences,
28 (1999): 53–68. See also Suzy Beemer, “Masks of Blackness, Masks of
Whiteness: Coloring the (Sexual) Subject in Jonson, Cary, and Fletcher,”
Thamyris, 4.2 (Autumn, 1997): 233–47. Beemer argues that the black/
white binary in the play trumps the Christian/Turk binary.
55 Jean Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in Renaissance
Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
56 Ibid., 15.
57 Hall, Things of Darkness, 160–6.
58 Quotations from The Devil’s Law-case are taken from The Works of John
Webster, eds. David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald Jackson,
vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76–167.
59 Fuller, Historie of the Holy Warre, 47.
60 Richard Jones, Booke of honor and armes (London, 1590), 55.
61 Segar, Honor military, and ciuill, 98.
62 Edward Grimstone, The estates, empires, & principallities of the world
(London, 1615), 1145.
63 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and
European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100.
On Spain’s attempt to construct itself as a homogeneous nation, see also
Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2003).
64 Fuchs, Passing for Spain, 2.
65 Quotations from The Maid of Honor are taken from The Plays and Poems
of Philip Massinger, eds. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, vol. I (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976), 104–97.
66 The Maid of Honour, ed. Eva Bryne (London, 1927), xxviii–xxxi.
67 I quote from the earliest English translation, The discovery and conquest
of the Molucco and Philippine islands (London, 1708), 146; first pub-
lished in Spanish in 1609, by Bartholomew Leonardo de Argensola.
68 I am grateful to Jean Feerick for bringing this passage to my attention and
for offering insight into its analysis.
Notes to Epilogue 257
69 See Feerick’s central argument in “‘Divided in Soyle’: Plantation and
Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage,” Renaissance Drama,
35 (2006): 27–54.
70 Quotations from The Travails of the Three English Brothers are taken
from Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), 55–134.
71 Parr, “Introduction,” in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, 10. Parr also
suggests that the fact that Anthony had converted to Catholicism during
his early travels may have been known to the playwrights and influenced
their decision to “present the pope as a dignified and credible spiritual
leader” (10).
72 Parr, “The Shirley Brothers and the ‘Voyage of Persia,’” in Travel and
Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele
Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14–31, 18.
73 Ibid., 20, 21.
Notes to Epilogue
1 Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
2 Cyrus Mulready, “‘Asia of the One Side, Affric of the Other’: Sidney’s
Unities and the Staging of Romance,” in Staging Early Modern Romance:
Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, eds. Valerie Wayne
and Mary Ellen Lamb (London: Routledge, 2008), 47–71.
3 Ibid., 49.
4 Philip Sidney, “The Defense of Poesy,” in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major
Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 243.
5 Ibid., 243.
6 Giambattista Guarini, The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry
(Compendio della poesia tragicomica), trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in Literary
Criticism from Plato to Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1962), 511.
7 Verna Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2004), 35.
8 Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the
Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008).
9 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesy,” 244.
10 Matthew Treherne, “The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy:
Guarini’s Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601,”
in Early Modern Tragicomedy, eds. Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 28–42, 36.
11 Guarini, Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 507.
12 Ibid., 509–10.
13 Ibid., 511.
14 John Fletcher, “To The Reader,” in The Faithful Shepherdess (London,
1608).
15 See for example Peter Berek, “Genres, Early Modern Theatrical Title
Pages, and the Authority of Print,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights,
Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 159–75.
16 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. John Harington (London,
1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972),
218. Subsequent references to Harington’s translation of the poem will
cite it parenthetically by book and stanza.
17 E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., The Arden Shakespeare Othello, 3rd ed. (London:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1996).
18 Thanks to Michael Neill for drawing this discussion to my attention in his
response to an early version of this chapter presented at the 2008 confer-
ence of the Renaissance Society of America.
19 Quotations from Greene’s Orlando Furioso are taken from The Historie
of Orlando Furioso, One of the Twelve Pieres of France, in The Plays and
Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I, ed. J. Churton Collins (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1905).
20 Timothy Billings, “Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss,”
Shakespeare Quarterly, 54.1 (Spring 2003):1–28, esp. 7 and 20–3.
Index
Adelman, Janet, 11, 231n, 246n5 materiality or tangible forms, 24–5, 37,
adventure plays, 80–4, 108, 117–18, 125, 206 121, 123, 142, 229n57
Africanus, John Leo, A geographical historie medieval traditions, 76, 87, 94, 119,
of Africa (1600), 56, 234n52 223n9
Agamben, Giorgio, 36, 72 miracle(s) and intercessory agency, 18–19,
Angelos, Christopher, Christopher Angell, A 21, 29, 94, 106, 115
Grecian (1617), 96–7 models, 27, 73, 76, 103–4, 115, 123, 124,
angels, 104, 106–7, 110, 112, 114–15, 142, 148, 150, 153, 200
244n65 objects and relics, 6, 7, 28, 29, 119,
Argensola, Bartholomew Leonardo de, 200, 121–2, 133–8, 178, 181, 196, 204,
201, 256n67 245–6n4, 248n24, 253n19
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516) see Order of the Knights of Malta see Knights
Greene, Robert, Orlando Furioso of Malta
Aristotelian unities, 210, 212, 213 persecution of Protestants, 86
Arminianism, 24, 33, 125, 142, 148, pope, 152, 157, 159, 160, 166, 179,
228–9n, 250n40 202–3
Arminius, Jacobus, 139, 228–9n52 practices, 20, 23, 28, 37, 114, 123, 140,
Askew Anne, 87, 241n32 146, 148, 161, 178, 202
saints’ tales and plays, 20, 79, 86, 100, 133
baptism see “baptism” under The Comedy source materials, 26, 85
of Errors; Othello; Pauline universal sympathies or tolerance for, 23, 24, 26,
fellowship; The Renegado 75, 125, 141, 142, 147, 160, 202
Badiou, Alain, 36, 72, 231–2n16 templates or narrative forms, 76, 86, 95,
Bartels, Emily, 56, 167–8, 252n7 97, 103–4, 115, 120
blackface, 143, 170, 185, 191, 250n44 torture, 79, 87–90, 95, 97, 100
Boose, Lynda, 103, 144 vow of chastity see chastity
Brenner, Robert, 79, 224n17,18 Whore of Babylon, 129, 247n17
Burton, Jonathan, 4, 10, 12, 15, 17, 58, 59, works, 40, 146
69, 121, 131, 225n22, 240n22, 249n31 Calvinism or Calvinists, 23, 33, 125, 126,
Butter, Nathaniel, 20, 228n45 139, 141–2, 146, 147, 228–9n52,
Bynum, Caroline Walker, 100, 227n42, 250n42
241n31 Calvin, John, 244n65
celibacy, vow of, 152, 153, 155, 161, 174,
Callaghan, Dympna, 13, 58 177, 181, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192,
Catholicism 193, 196, 199; see also chastity
conversion to or from, 24, 38, 257n71 Chassanion, Jean de, The mechandises of
embodied rituals, 7, 26, 37, 85, 121–2, popish priests (1629), 134, 135
153 chastity
Eucharist, 123, 144–5 as agent of Christian conversion, 112
idols and idolatry, 24, 39, 107, 115, 133, Catholic models of, or vowed celibacy,
134, 178 26, 30, 104, 111, 142, 152, 153, 154,
martyrdom, 21–3, 26, 66, 73–4, 89–95, 155, 157, 161, 174, 175, 177, 184,
97: martyrologies, 89, 90, 242n37; 186, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196,
martyr plays, 22–3, 28 199, 200, 206
chastity (cont.) commerce see trade
and Christian faith, 51, 100, 114, 181, complexion see skin color
200 Coolidge, John, 34, 35, 40
and cross-dressing, 16, 166 Crusades, 9, 10, 21, 140–1, 152, 157
female, 29, 64–7 (Desdemona), 98, 109,
113, 116, 118, 119, 123, 167, 236n78 Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turke
female as model for male, 76, 80, 116, (c.1610), 14–17, 75, 81, 83, 125–6,
119, 162, 175, 193, 253n24 127, 129, 131–2, 145, 176
male, 116, 119, 127, 153, 162, 174, 175, Davies, William, A true relation of the
177, 182, 192, 193, 194, 197, 200, travailes (1614), 161
201, 206 Dawson, Anthony, 8–9, 149–50
miraculously preserved or unbreakable, Day, John, George Wilkins, and William
106, 113, 133–4, 138, 149 Rowley, The Travails of the Three
physically-constituted or embodied, 6, English Brothers (c.1607)
100, 123, 134, 142, 153, 155, 184 Catholic content, 202–3
and race, 235–6n77 Christian brotherhood, 157, 204–5
and reproduction, 118, 175, 181, 184, Christian/Persian alliance, 202, 203
192, 200 Christian resistance to superior forces, 95
spiritually- and physically-constituted, 81, geographical setting, significance of, 201
82, 120 pan-Christian alliance, 118, 202
virginity see virginity restraint as a hallmark of masculinity, 80,
Christian body, the, 2–3, 7, 17–18, 27, 29, 108, 201, 206
49, 86–7, 93–5, 100, 113, 153, 174 Dekker, Thomas
Christian resistance, 17–21 Lust’s Dominion; or, The Lascivious
Catholic models of, 28, 29, 66, 73, 86, Queen (c.1600), 102, 234n55, 246n6
87, 95, 118, 122, 123, 124, 133, The Whore of Babylon (1607), 202,
142–3, 153, 200 247n17
and comic resolution or Christian Dekker, Thomas, and Philip Massinger, The
triumph, 17, 18, 20, 22, 97, 105 Virgin Martyr (1620)
entertainment value, 20 Cappadocia, significance of, 76–7, 85
female sexual, 17, 21, 29, 66, 75, 76, 81, castration and circumcision, 82–5
86, 107, 111, 115, 116, 133, 142–3, Catholic content, 74–5, 79
162, 167 contemporary resonance, 75–6, 80–3
and gender, 27, 66, 122, 132–3, 157, female chastity and virginity, 100–3
162, 167 female constancy as a model for male
and martyrdom, 76, 87, 95, 103, 105, restraint, 76, 97, 116–19
108, 121, 204 generic inversion, 97–8
and masculine conquest, 201 martyrdom in Catholic and Protestant
miraculous, 17, 21, 73, 75, 76, 86, 94, traditions, 87–95
105, 107, 115, 133 Protestant valences, 85–6
narrative structures, models, or templates, rape, 100, 102–3
23, 76, 118, 121, 124, 133, 208 St. Dorothy, legend of, 77–8
physically-constituted or embodied, 4, 7, torture and resistance, 90–5
18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 35, 76, 81, 86, Diehl, Huston, 53–4, 86–7, 87–9, 241n28
87, 122, 123, 142–3, 153, 200 Dimmock, Matthew, 10, 225n23, 254n31
tangible methods of, 7, 26, 29, 35, 122, dueling, representations of, 162, 176–7,
123, 134, 142–3, 148, 200 186, 255n48
to torture, 97, 107, 108, 202
circumcision, significance of, 2, 11, 25, 32, ecumenicalism, 24, 26, 141, 151, 152, 153,
37, 58, 71, 82–5, 128, 131–2, 164 168, 178, 196, 202
“circumcision of the heart,” 25, 33, 42, Eden, Richard (trans). Peter Martyr
103, 230n3 d’Anghiera, The decades of the Newe
class, 46, 177, 185, 186, 189, 192, 200, Worlde (1555), 59–60
206, 207, 214, 215 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 24, 50, 79,
and cross-cultural encounter, 185, 200, 108, 160, 166, 168, 194, 206, 233n45,
206 254n31
in relation to civility or gentility, 80, Ethiopian eunuch, 25, 38–9, 60
200–1, 206, 215
in relation to race, 192, 206, 214 Feerick, Jean, 12–13, 184, 200–1
in relation to rank or blood, 13, 200 Fletcher, John, The Faithful Shepherdess
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 39 (1608), 213–14
Index 261
Fletcher, John, Nathan Field, and Philip Hakluyt, Richard, The principall
Massinger, The Knight of Malta nauigations (1589–1600), 68, 102
(c.1618) Hall, Kim, 13, 38, 185, 254n29
chastity, 174–5, 177–8, 181, 184 Hampton Court Conference (1604), 33–4,
feminine modeling of resistance, 179, 62, 249n34,35
181, 183 Hanmer, Meredith, The baptizing of a
King James and pan-Christian alliance, Turke (1586), 61, 235n66
173–4, 178 Harington, John, Orlando Furioso (1591)
male fellowship, 174–5, 176–7 see Greene, Robert, Orlando Furioso
masculinity, civil and uncivil, 175–6, 179, Harris, Jonathan Gil, 41, 43, 121, 131, 137,
182 248n23, 240n17
membership in the Knights of Malta, Heywood, Thomas
criteria for, 177 The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1
reproduction, consequences of, 175, 179, (c.1604), 80, 83, 234n55, 236n78,
181, 182–3 240n20
Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 13, 226n33, 234n56, Fortune by Land and Sea (c.1609), 22,
235–6n77 80, 108
Forman, Valerie, 44, 121, 131, 212, Hieron, Samuel, The baptizing of the
248n23 eunuch (1613), 25
Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments or Book Hooker, Richard, 62, 250n39
of Martyrs (1563–1610), 61, 76, 86–9, Howard, Jean, 80, 125, 234n, 240n18, 20,
93, 100, 102, 240n25, 241n27 252n7
Fuchs, Barbara, 80, 121, 131, 191, 225n21,
256n63 Jackson, Thomas, The convert’s happiness
Fuller, Thomas, The historie of the holy (1609), 47
warre (1639), 160–1, 188, 253n19 James I, King of England, 24, 62, 68, 79,
126, 141, 152, 174, 178, 194–5, 197,
Gallonio, Antonio, Trattato de gli 229n52, 245–6n4, 247n15, 248n21,
instrumenti di martyrio (1591), 89–92, 249n34, 255n46
93, 97, 241–2n36, 242n39 Lepanto, 68
gender, 16–17, 29, 30, 66, 76, 118, 121, Jesuits see Massinger, The Renegado,
123–4, 132–3; see also Christian Jesuitism
resistance and gender Jones, Richard, Booke of honor and armes
genre or generic form, 6, 15, 23, 27, 30, 44, (1590), 188
74, 80, 116, 155, 199, 208, 209–10,
214, 216, 258n15 Kearney, James, 114
Goad, Thomas, 62 Kellet, Edward and Henry Byam, A returne
Good newes to Christendome (1620) from Argier (1628), 95, 147, 243n46
(Anon.), 18–20 Kneidel, Gregory, 35–6, 37, 40, 71, 72,
Greene, Robert, Orlando Furioso (c.1591) 231–2n12
Ariosto, revisions of, 208–11, 215, 217, Knight, Francis, A relation of seaven yeares
218, 220–1 slaverie (1640), 97–8
class and religious distinctions, 214–15, Knights of Malta, 29, 140–1
219 apparel, 152, 179–80, 196
colonial implications, 217–18 Catholic roots and papal jurisdiction,
comic ending, 208–9, 216, 217–18, 152, 159–61, 253n19
221–2 chastity (or celibacy), vow of, 30, 152,
Harington’s translation of Ariosto, 153, 154, 155, 161, 174, 177, 184,
compared with, 215, 216, 217, 218–19 186, 188, 192–4, 199, 206
love triangle, 208–9, 217–19 history of the Order, 157–9, 252n8
romance elements, 211–12, 220 homosocial brotherhood, 155, 184
sexual contamination by Muslims, 209, pan-Christian alliance, 152, 154, 174,
221 192, 200, 251n4
stage performance compared with positive dramatic representation, 152
narrative account, 210, 220 as renegades, 152, 153, 158, 182, 185
tragicomic structure, 212, 214, 220–1 Kyd, Thomas, Soliman and Perseda (c.1589)
Grimstone, Edward (trans). Pierre D’Avity, Basilisco, 163–4
The estates, empires, and principallities chivalric code, 162–3
of the world (1615), 10, 188 Erastus, 162, 163, 165
Guarini, Giambattista, Il pastor fido (1581), military and sexual conquest, comparison
212–14 between, 162, 163, 164
Kyd, Thomas, Soliman and Perseda (c.1589) baptism: Donusa’s ‘holy badge,’ 138–9;
(cont.) lay baptism, 139–40, 249n34,35
nationalism, 162–3 Calvinism, challenges to, 126, 139–40,
Perseda: as defender of Rhodes, 165, 166, 142, 146
167; her martyrdom as triumph, 162, Catholic materials and rituals, 122–3,
165–7 134, 139–40, 142, 144–6, 245n2,4
Queen Elizabeth and contemporary Christian Turned Turk, A, comparisons
politics, 166 with, 125–6
sexual resistance and restraint, 162, circumcision and castration, 127–8,
165 131–2
commerce with Ottoman empire, 124,
Lamb, Charles, 53 126–7
Lambeth Articles (1595), 33–4, 62, 230n5 commodity exchange as an analogue for
Laud, William, 125, 139, 141–2, 146, 147, religious conversion, 126, 128
250n40 contemporary resonance, 124, 141
Loomba, Ania, 12, 13, 57, 102, 179, 238n6, gender, and faith, resistance, and
249n30 redemption, 121, 123, 133
Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 11, 32, 35–6, 40, Jesuitism, portrayal of, 122, 129–31, 134,
57–8, 68, 71, 72, 169, 231n11,12 145, 248n21
Laudism, foreshadowing of, 125, 139,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Mandrake 141–2, 146–7
(1518), 73, 102 pan-Christian alliance, 141, 142
McJannet, Linda, 10, 12, 41, 225n23, Paulina’s religious relic, 122, 123, 133–8
239n13 Pauline universalism, limitations of, 121,
Malieckal, Bindu, 121, 141, 183, 256n54 133
Malta, siege of, 154, 158–9, 160, 173, 174, racial implications, 123–4, 143–4, 151
252n13 reversal of apostasy, 122–3, 132–3,
Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta 144–7
(c.1589) sexual intercourse and religious
alliance with Spain, 167–9, 172, 173 conversion, linkage of, 124, 128, 128,
alliance with the Turks, 168–9, 172 142–4
comic and tragic perspectives, 172–3 theatricality and performance, 148–50
Ithamore: physical appearance, 169–70; tragicomic form and resolution, 125, 126
relationship with Bellamira, 169, 170–2 virginity and verification, 134–7
martyrdom see Catholicism; Christian Matar, Nabil, 10, 61, 126, 225n22,
resistance; Dekker and Massinger, The 227n36, 235n66
Virgin Martyr Medieval drama, 93, 95, 106, 114, 212,
Mason, John, The Turke (c.1607), 102, 237n3, 242n40,41
246n6 Mediterranean trade see trade
Massinger, Philip, The Maid of Honor Metzger, Mary Janell, 124, 246n5
(c.1621–2) Middleton, Thomas, A Game at Chess
Catholicism, portrayal of, 194, 196 (1624), 124
chastity, 192, 193, 197, 199 miracle(s) see Catholic miracle(s)
contemporary political resonance, 194–5, Monta, Susannah Brietz, 85, 86, 101, 238n5
197 Montagu, Richard, A gagg for the new
ending, 198–9 gospel? (1624) and Appello Caesarem
female virtue as a model for masculine (1625), 141
reform, 192, 193 Moors or Moorishness, 50, 52, 56–7, 66,
generic inversions, 192, 193, 194, 199 68, 72, 191–2, 234n53,55,56
imperialism, 195, 197 Muslims as sexual predators, 14, 16, 21,
masculine conquest, honorable and 102, 123, 134, 165, 167, 236n78
dishonorable, 195, 198
Ottoman empire, threat of, 195–6 Neill, Michael, 125, 227n33
pan-Christian brotherhood, 192, 195–6, news or news pamphlets, 2, 4, 5, 14, 20, 21,
199 81, 108, 210, 228n45
Soliman and Perseda, comparisons with,
192, 193, 194, 195 Oakes, John, 108
tragicomic plot, 199 Okeley, William, Eben-ezer, or, A small
Massinger, Philip, The Renegado (c.1624) monument of great mercy (1684), 97,
Arminian sympathies, question of, 125, 99
142, 148 Orientalism, 10–11
Index 263
Ottoman empire, 1, 9–10, 21, 35, 42, 75, Segar, William, Honor military and ciuill
76, 118, 122, 124, 126, 141, 153, 158, (1602), 156, 179–80, 188
166, 174, 195, 203 September 11, 2001, 31
commerce with see trade sexuality, 3, 4, 6, 21, 22, 27, 29, 66, 67, 75,
imperial threat of, 9–10, 75, 154, 158 81, 84, 101, 102, 103, 116–18, 124,
126–9, 132, 137, 143–4, 154, 161,
pagan persecution of Christians, ancient, 164–5, 169–71, 174–9, 181–2, 191,
22, 29 200, 208
Diocletian, 77, 78, 86, 112 and race, 13, 17, 143, 206, 218, 220
Vandal, 104–5 sexual contamination, 16, 29, 35, 74, 75,
paganism, New World, Eastern, or African, 102, 106, 116, 118, 119, 124, 125,
55, 57–8, 59–60, 201, 208, 217 163, 174, 183, 189, 191, 209
Parker, Patricia, 40, 41, 211, 232–3n33, sexual intercourse, 6, 14, 15, 22, 75, 102,
247n13 116, 124, 125, 128, 129
Pauline universal fellowship, 28, 32–3, 37, sexual seduction, 14–17, 102, 123, 126,
39, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51, 63, 64, 68, 69, 127, 162, 170, 176
71–2, 121 sexual violence see rape
baptism as a spiritual conversion, 25, Shakespeare, William, The Comedy of
37–9, 47, 48, 50–1, 57, 61, 138–9 Errors (c.1594)
communal identity, 35–6, 37 baptism, 47–8
messianic dimensions, 35, 36, 37, 72 conversion, threat of, 35, 42–3
Pickett, Holly Crawford, 24, 84, 115 Ephesus, significance of, 34–5, 41–2,
piracy, 15, 23, 35, 42, 79, 108, 126–7, 131, 232n31, 239n13
141, 152, 158, 239n15, 247n15 family, reconciliation of, 44–5, 48–9
popular press, 5–6, 108 identity and social organization, 46–7
predestination, doctrine of, 33, 61–4, 69, interchangeableness of bodies, 39–40,
139, 142, 147 45–6
Protestant reform and controversy, 6–8, mercantile trade and global economics,
23–5, 27, 28, 34, 36, 37, 39, 53–4, 62, 34, 41–3: analogy for Pauline
72, 74, 78, 85, 86, 89, 93, 114, 115, universalism, 40–1; trade embargo,
133, 137, 140, 142, 146, 152, 160, 43–5; uneven exchanges, 45–6
181, 228n50, 52, 229n57 Pauline universalism, 33, 40–1, 45, 46–7
English Protestantism, 18–19, 29, 33, 34, spiritual differences in relation to physical
36, 38, 62, 85–7, 123, 130, 133, 134, differences, 35, 48
148, 152, 174, 195, 202, 203 Shakespeare, William, Othello (c.1604)
Protestant spirituality, 7, 25, 32, 37, 38, baptism, 25–6, 33, 39, 50–1
86, 87, 121, 122–3, 143 black body, 50, 51–5, 58–9, 65
capacity for Christian conversion, 39,
race and proto-racialism, 6, 8, 11–14, 17, 49–50, 55, 69–70
27, 31, 49–50, 58–61, 67, 75, 102–3, circumcision, 57, 58
106, 118, 131, 143–4, 151, 165, Cyprus, multiple valences, 67–9
175, 184, 191–2, 200, 206, 226n30, damnation, 63–4, 69–70
226–7n33, 235–6n77, 238n6; see also Desdemona: chastity and constancy, 51,
skin color 64–7; faith, 53–4, 64–5, 72
rape, 14, 16, 81, 89, 100–3, 105–7, 109, faith and the body, relationship between,
110, 111, 113, 115, 116–18, 167, 175, 49, 63, 70
179, 182 lack of faith, 51, 54–5, 64, 70
Rawlins, John, The famous and wonderfull Moorishness, 56–7
recoverie (1622), 2–4, 5, 14, 16, 17–18, opposition between sight and belief, or
20 material and intangible proof, 50,
Red Bull Theatre, 22, 28, 29, 73, 74, 95, 51–5, 64–5, 66–7
103, 108, 109, 115, 199, 205, 243–4 origins of Othello, 55–6, 57
Reformation (in England) see Protestant Pauline universalism, 63–4, 67, 68, 69, 71
reform and controversy predestination, 61–4, 69, 235n75
repertory system, 22, 27, 199 racial difference, 50, 58–9
Rhodes, siege of, 154, 158, 162, 164, 254n34 Shirley, Henry, The Martyred Soldier (1619)
Robinson, Benedict, 10, 11, 125, 225–6n23 divine intervention, 104, 106–7
romance, conventions of, 4, 21, 22, 30, 56, martyrdom and Christian resistance, 105,
102, 117, 170, 209, 211–12, 219, 220, 107
221 medieval miracle plays, connection to,
and chivalry, 162–3, 253n26,27 106
Shirley, Henry, The Martyred Soldier (1619) tragicomedy, 23–4, 30, 44, 125, 148, 150,
(cont.) 187, 199, 210, 212–14, 218, 220, 221
North African setting, 104, 105 travel narratives or travelers’ tales, 2, 5, 50,
Printing and marketing history, 108–9 56, 81
rape, 105, 107 “Turk” plays, 10, 122, 201
Shirley, Thomas, Henry’s father, 107–8 The Two Noble Ladies and the Converted
Vandal persecutions, 104 Conjurer (1622) (Anon.)
Sidney, Philip, “The Defense of Poesy” ancient and contemporary parallels, 109,
(1595), 211–12, 216 113
skin color, 12, 31, 57, 58, 59–61, 64, 67, Christianity and paganism, 109, 111
123, 143, 175, 181, 182–3, 184, 217 female chastity and conversion, 110,
Smith, Henry, “The Sinner’s Conversion,” 111–12, 115–16
38–9 female constancy as a model for male
Spain, 9, 38, 158 restraint, 115–16
dramatic representations of, 167–8, 173, magic and supernatural forces: angels,
178, 185, 187, 203, 204, 205, 254n31 114–15; in contrast to Christian faith,
relations with England, 24, 26, 42, 124, 113, 114, 115
141, 166, 174, 178, 194, 195 martyrdom and Christian resistance,
Spanish drama or sources, 21, 79, 124 111–12
Spanish match, 24, 124, 141 torture, 110–11
Spanish Moors or Moriscoes, 56, 191 virginity and rape, 111, 113
Stradling, John, Beati Pacifici (1623), 129 Tyacke, Nicholas, 34, 142
temperance, 6, 21, 154, 175, 178, 201, 206 virgin martyr legends, 20–1, 66, 74, 77–9,
theater 82, 83, 87, 95, 100–1, 112, 242n43,
difference from non-dramatic texts, 5, 15, 243n56
209 virginity, 19, 21, 27, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 86,
imaginative role of, 5, 6, 8, 34, 153 87, 100–2, 111, 115, 118, 119, 122,
secular nature of, 115, 148–50 133, 136, 138, 144, 155, 192, 199,
staging limitations, 14, 58, 95 239n12, 243–4n56, 248n26
theatrical medium, 22, 209, 210, 220 Vitkus, Daniel, 10, 43, 57, 67–8, 80,
theatricality, 4–6, 94–5, 148–50, 211 121, 126, 167, 225n22, 227n36,
visual nature of, 4, 26, 28, 52–3, 58, 67, 249n28
95, 170, 179, 182, 191, 196 Voragine, Jacobus de, Legenda aurea (The
Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of Golden Legend) (1252–60), 19, 77–8,
England, 62 89–90, 240n25
Thirty Years War, 85
torture, 2–3, 4, 20, 78, 87–90, 95–7, 100, Ward, John, 14–15, 22, 83, 182
104, 105, 108, 110 Webster, John, The Devil’s Law-case
resistance to, 18, 21, 87–90, 94, 97, 105, (c.1619)
107, 108 blackface disguise, 191–2
spectacle or theatricality of, 4, 90–5, 97 bloodlines and reproductive purity, 184,
trade 185, 187–8, 191–2
Barbary coast, 23, 81, 127, 158 Christian-Muslim warfare, 185, 187, 188,
commodities or commodity exchange, 42, 189, 190
43, 68, 113, 126–8, 217, 248n23 duel, significance of, 186
and conversion, 41–2, 68, 80, 126, global context and trade, 185, 187, 189
231n10 homosocial fellowship, 184, 185–6,
English in the Mediterranean, 1, 9, 34, 190
41–4, 68, 79, 80, 118, 126, 131, 154, masculine gentility and nobility, 190
231n9 membership in the Knights of Malta,
global trade or economics, 34, 37, 40, 43, criteria for, 188–9
154, 185, 186–7 proto-racialism, 189, 191–2
Levant Company, 9, 42 Whitgift, John, 62, 249n34,35
marketplace, 126–7 Williamson, Elizabeth, 7, 114, 181, 256n53
piracy and captivity, 9, 42–3, 79, 81, 108, Wotton, Henry, A courtlie controversie
126–7, 158 (1578), 163–4, 167, 236n80

0748640843

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

0748640843

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance

on the Early Modern Stage

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Edinburgh University Press

© Jane Hwang Degenhardt, 2010

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in Sabon and Futura

ISBN 978 0 7486 4084 3 (hardback)

The right of Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption:

1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily

Figure 0.1: “Prophetic Visions,” from Ludovico Cortano,

Seduction, Resistance, and

Nay, if the flesh take hold of him, he’s past redemption.

Could anything be worse than being captured by Turks, stripped,

Conversion and Theatricality

In addition, my study addresses how these negotiations were performed

Commercial and Imperial Backdrop

Recent historians, seeking to redress the long-overlooked influence

The question of whether race is a valid category for talking about

Seduction and the Stage

As the plays I discuss in this book reveal, sexual seduction functions as

Figure 0.1: “Prophetic Visions,” from Ludovico Cortano, Good newes to

in miraculous visions such as a rainstorm of blood, and often mocked

To devise plots of Christian-Muslim encounter, English playwrights

A Culture of Religious Unrest

As I suggested earlier in this introduction, dramas of conversion not only

The Stage and Tangible Forms

The early modern stage responded to the problem of faith’s invisibility

Each of the following chapters focuses tightly on localized readings to

Dangerous Fellowship: Universal

St. Paul’s famous statement of universal fellowship radically proposes

St. Paul’s Legacy and Renaissance England

If Coolidge demonstrated the centrality of Pauline theology to the

Pauline Faith and Mercantile Exchange in The Comedy of Errors

Set in the Mediterranean port city of Ephesus, The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare’s Leap of Faith? Othello’s Unconvertible Difference

First performed around 1604, Othello presupposes the Christian con-

In drawing a parallel between the “seals and symbols” that confirm

Seeing (Beyond) the Black Body

Compounding the dramatic impact of Othello’s bodily presence on

His explicit willingness to “be found” calls attention to the visual

Significantly, Othello’s native origins are never definitively established

Skin Color and Marking Faith

It is worth underscoring the point that whereas Othello’s potential cir-

Predestination and the Terms of Salvation

Although in the years leading up to Othello’s production in 1604,

According to Goad, to argue that grace was available to Turks was

Faith and Female Chastity

Importantly, Othello does not attribute the Moor’s exclusion from

Cyprus, the Miracle of Gentile Conversion, and Othello’s

Given Othello’s setting in Cyprus, an Ottoman territory that had histor-

Shakespeare’s plays reveal the impracticalities of living out univer-

Recycled Models: Catholic

I have such terrible fears of being impaled by a Turk.

As my discussions of The Comedy of Errors and Othello illustrate,

draws a distinction between Christian and pagan identity that I will

The Legend of St. Dorothy

Dekker and Massinger’s popular play was based on the medieval

As I have begun to suggest, Dekker and Massinger’s dramatic adap-

Conversion and the “Adventure Play”

As we have seen, the threat of conversion confronted by thou-